Top all-time · #16673
Server Check.in
Company blog · servercheck.in/blogsystemsstartups
Server Check.in is the company blog at servercheck.in, writing about systems and startups. Since 2012, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Server Check.in as a simple website and server uptime monitoring service. One commenter says a very simple tool does the trick for their needs and does it very well.
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.
Unlimited SMS and email notifications.
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2012-12-10
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-01
What Hacker News says?
I don't think it's just Cloudflare; I just had a fun 10 minutes seeing servers start flipping on my Server monitoring service[1]. This has only happened once or twice per year, and is usually due to weird global DNS issues. [1] https://servercheck.in/ (To give an update, I'm seeing from my monitoring systems (about 15 points around the globe) sporadic outages for Microsoft, Apple, Reddit, Bing, Node.js, Twitter, Yah…
Comment linking /
on “Cloudflare was down”Submitted Using Ansible Galaxy as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI'm publishing as I go on LeanPub; I've written a little about the process so far on Server Check.in[1]. I'll probably work on getting the book on Amazon/Kindle before it's in its '1.0' state, but LeanPub will always have the latest version of the book (including after the '1.0' release). [1] https://servercheck.in/blog/self-publishing-my-first-technic...
Comment linking /blog/self-publishing-my-first-technical-book-leanpub
on “Why Puppet, Chef, Ansible aren't good enough”Submitted Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring as a story · 32 points
HN discussionThis will be interesting to watch; I hope OpenBSD can do for OpenSSL what they did for OpenSSH—clean it, refine it, repackage it, and make it even better, ready for a new decade of use. I published a blog post which mentions how OpenBSD transformed SSH into the de-facto remote administration standard it is today just this morning[1]. I think this will be good news! [1] https://servercheck.in/blog/brief-history-ssh-a…
Comment linking /blog/brief-history-ssh-and-remote-access
on “OpenBSD has started a massive strip-down and cleanup of OpenSSL”Submitted $25K in LeanPub book sales, and I'm almost ready to publish as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://hostedapachesolr.com - since 2013, started with intention of just hosting my own search indexes (since cheap shared hosting didn't allow java apps to be installed), then ballooned from there. Minimal maintenance, almost every process is automated with Ansible + Jenkins + tiny bits of PHP glue code. https://servercheck.in - since 2012, same as Solr, I started it to do SMS messages for my own site outages... t…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell”Submitted Four years running Server Check.in as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHere are a few benchmarks I ran against DO, Linode, and Hot Drupal (another provider I've used in the past): http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-be... I've been very happy with my testing on Digital Ocean; the servers are fast, they remain up as much as any other provider, and the interface/service is great, and is improving every month. The only sore spot is that two times I've had intermitten…
Comment linking /
on “The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean”Submitted Show HN: I'm self-publishing my first book on LeanPub as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI use many RamNodes for https://servercheck.in/ - the price is right!
Comment linking /
on “11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan”Submitted Ansible Deployments Visualized with a Raspberry Pi Cluster as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've had five 1GB VPSes running on Digital Ocean for the past year, for http://www.hostedapachesolr.com/ . Of the five of them, three seem to have 5-10 minute downtimes about once per week as measured by https://servercheck.in/ . On Linode, I stopped using their 2 GB VPSes for the past year, but before that, I had 3 of them. One had about 5 minutes of unscheduled downtime over the course of a year, the other two onl…
Comment linking /
on “11th Linode Birthday, $10 Linode plan”Submitted Writing on LeanPub – $0.21 per word as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have tested this in the past, and a few clients on the service I launched last year ( https://servercheck.in/ ) have also reported the same: Google Docs is unreliable at best. Besides false positives, there were at least two or three outages (sometimes for an hour or more) unreported. Google Docs is not meant to be a status monitoring tool. Use the right tool for the job; there are plenty of free and cheap alterna…
Comment linking /
on “Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs”Submitted $25K in book sales, and I'm almost ready to publish as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's a fun way to learn about a good variety of things; http and other protocols, distributed architecture, how poor most sites' uptime truly is... I built https://servercheck.in/ for that reason, and because I wanted cheap 'real' SMS notifications (from a consistent phone number) so I could set a special ringtone on my phone when one of my servers goes down.
Comment linking /
on “Uptime Robot”Submitted A brief history of SSH and remote access as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've made a similar observation to the original post — in my case, moving a bit of functionality from PHP to Node.js gave me 100x better performance: https://servercheck.in/blog/moving-functionality-nodejs-incr... But the reason for this wasn't that Node/JS is faster than PHP; it was because I was able to write the Node.js app asynchronously, but the PHP version was making hundreds of synchronous requests (this is t…
Comment linking /blog/moving-functionality-nodejs-increased-server
on “Benchmarking Codswallop: Node.js vs. PHP”Submitted Lessons Learned Building the Raspberry Pi Dramble as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have very simple needs in this regard, so a very simple tool does the trick and does it very well: https://servercheck.in
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?”Submitted Highly-Available Infrastructure Provisioning and Configuration with Ansible as a story · 3 points
HN discussionJust a couple quick responses, at least as far as Server Check.in is concerned: a, b, c are currently not on my radar (since I don't want to spread myself thin :). d - I have the site name, but not the status, at this time. That's a good point (of course, SMS messages being limited to 160 characters makes this a bit tougher than it should be for SMS). e - Server Check.in uses one predictable number (no email-to-sms…
Comment linking /sms
on “Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring”Submitted Use Vagrant 1.8's new ansible_local provisioner for Ansible provisioning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSure thing! I considered using email-to-SMS and lowering the cost to < $1.00/month, but didn't want to make that compromise. I do have to limit the SMS messages to 50/month (600/year) maximum at this point (see: https://servercheck.in/sms ), until I can better track people's usage patterns and make sure I don't get hammered with larger fees than I'm taking in. That limit will hopefully be lifted at some point.
Comment linking /sms
on “Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring”Submitted 6 Lessons Learned Self-publishing my first book as a story · 2 points
HN discussionServer Check.in will never have ads, and the privacy policy ( https://servercheck.in/privacy ) is pretty clear cut. The revenue comes from the users, so the service is 100% user-focused. I noticed their service when building Server Check.in, but didn't create an account for testing, so can't say anything with 100% certainty. However... - SMS is not free (unless they're using email-to-SMS gateways), so I'm not sure h…
Comment linking /privacy
on “Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring”Submitted Show HN: I self-published a book on Ansible as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've been using Pingdom's free plan to monitor one site for many, many years. I'm guessing that SolarWinds has had this in the plan for a while, as the free tier likely has very few conversions since going from free to paid is a bit of a jump to ~$10/month ($120/year). For someone who just wants to know if a site is up or down, and has a dozen cheap or free services to choose from (I also sometimes use UptimeRobot),…
Comment linking /
on “Pingdom discontinues free plan”Submitted I'm writing a book on Ansible, and I've made $25k before publishing as a story · 2 points
HN discussion