Top all-time · #5200
OnlineOrNot
Company blog · onlineornot.com · on HN as rozenmdwebprogramming
OnlineOrNot is the company blog at onlineornot.com, writing about web and programming. Since 2019, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 258 times, most often “Show HN: OnlineOrNot – A GraphQL Snapshot Testing and Monitoring Service”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this SaaS site for its uptime tools: a website down checker, an uptime calculator, and a post about running a SaaS for eight months. Comments mostly address the product, not the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
OnlineOrNot monitors your websites, APIs, and cron jobs, and sends you immediate alerts when things go wrong via Email, SMS, Slack, Telegram, PagerDuty, and more.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: OnlineOrNot – A GraphQL Snapshot Testing and Monitoring Service3 people · 73 mentions · first linked 2019-02-02
- Show HN: Site unresponsive? Check if it's down everywhere with OnlineOrNot2 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2021-02-25
- Ways to avoid losing your domain2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-05
- 8 Months of OnlineOrNot: From MVP to Stable Product2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-03
- /articles2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-31
- What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-09
- Two months in: How the SaaS that was built in 7 days is going2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-13
What Hacker News says?
I'm not quite there yet, but I've been making $300/mo running an uptime checker for JavaScript apps (supports normal websites too): https://onlineornot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell”Submitted What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages as a story · 266 points
HN discussionCan confirm writing about what you saw, how you responded, and giving advice to others works even in highly competitive fields. I write about React (same as thousands of other developers) at https://maxrozen.com , get 10k readers a month now I started an uptime monitoring service despite 200 others already existing ( https://OnlineOrNot.com ), getting around 75 users a month. Now about to do the same with feature fl…
Comment linking /
on “Do things, tell people (2012)”Submitted What I learned running a SaaS for a year as a story · 241 points
HN discussionI built a service that tells you whether your team's website/API or cron jobs are online, or not. It's called OnlineOrNot: https://onlineornot.com Coming close to 4 years of operation!
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on “Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell”Submitted Communicating to Users During Incidents as a story · 38 points
HN discussionPS: I'm not a user of SSLPing, but I built OnlineOrNot and we have a basic SSL verification feature that'll alert you when your SSL certificate is no longer valid: https://onlineornot.com/docs/ssl-verification Looking at building out this feature further (with expiry warnings 3/7/14/x days before cert expiry), let me know if you're interested.
Comment linking /docs/ssl-verification
on “I must announce the immediate end of service of SSLPing”Submitted Six months in: How the SaaS that was built in 7 days is going as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI've been working on OnlineOrNot ( https://onlineornot.com ) for the past 3.5 years - this year I've been focusing on "finishing" my MVPs. In particular, I've been building functionality for status pages to make it more useful for software teams.
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on “Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?”Submitted On how I got my first ten customers as a story · 15 points
HN discussionhere's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD... Looks like it's hosted in London?
Comment linking /website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD1Oi-61ia_Y90gSkd&url=https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/
on “Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector”Submitted Guidelines to help you avoid losing your domain as a story · 8 points
HN discussionMy other "I don't care if it succeeds project" is an uptime checker I've been building extremely iteratively: https://onlineornot.com/ Mainly started building it because I wanted to learn more about running a business, marketing, and SEO (all the technical parts of the business are relatively easy in comparison). I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added…
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on “Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?”Submitted The unreasonable effectiveness of shipping every day as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI'm not quite there yet, but I'm up to $300/mo iteratively building an uptime checker: https://onlineornot.com/ I started with literally just a Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it. Eventually, I added Slack/Discord/SMS alerts, team invites, support for checking APIs for both uptime…
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on “Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell”Submitted Improving your team's on-call experience as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI've spent the last four years now trying to start a business on the Internet (working on ideas roughly two hours per day before work). I kinda regret that I didn't just build one thing, and stick to it until it succeeded, but each project had valuable lessons (both business and code/architecture) that carried over into the next one. So far I've built: - bill splitting service (2017) I spent days agonising over whic…
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on “Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?”Submitted I accidentally told 19k people Hacker News was down as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ ) I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It…
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on “Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell”Submitted Saving your team from alert fatigue as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI built a website monitoring service (last I checked, 191 alternatives on AlternativeTo). Customers really really really don't want to have to run their own solution. They want to be able to pay someone to make the pain go away. ( https://onlineornot.com if you're curious)
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on “Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools”Submitted Guidelines for Writing Better Runbooks as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGreat project, love your advanced API checking! Just noticed your website checker might have a bug: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=Kfd51...
Comment linking /website-down-checker?requestId=Kfd51mMZz13X2rtKgqOZT&url=https://www.google.com
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted Monitoring your application as a solo founder as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMore or less the same project since Feb 2021: OnlineOrNot ( https://onlineornot.com ). Idea is to be the uptime monitoring + status page solution software teams choose. Next big project I'm looking at is making a terraform provider for uptime checks, so setting up alerts for your new microservice becomes seamless. Still years away from employing me full time, but we're getting there.
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted Show HN: Browser-Based Uptime Checks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOnlineOrNot ( https://onlineornot.com ) Planning on wrapping up the year with a year in review post (thankfully I've been writing monthly updates as I go, should save some time). Apart from that, clearing up tech debt that helped me ship fast, but was ultimately a bad fit for the business (Next.js and GraphQL).
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)”Submitted Show HN: OnlineOrNot – Uptime Checks via Puppeteer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs always, I'm working on OnlineOrNot ( https://OnlineOrNot.com ). This past week or so I've managed to reduce my AWS Lambda spend by more than half by moving the compute to Cloudflare Workers (where I don't get billed for I/O time, only CPU time).
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)”Submitted OnlineOrNot's lessons from Cloudflare's outage on 2025-11-18 as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
