I have worked as a freelance web developer for years and have a lot of projects behind my back. I have worked with a lot of different clients and sooner or later they all face the same problem — how do you know that your site works and is available 24x7? Either there is a network problem, a problem on the server-side, or the server application itself is not working properly. One way or another, users cannot access your website. It could happen to large services like Google, Youtube, Amazon, but smaller and simpler solutions experience it as well. That’s why, you need a third-party service that checks if your website is available on the World Wide Web 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There are over 9,000 such services. A simple search in your favorite search engine will give you a load of results, including such a giant as Atlassian. I think you’ll agree — it’s almost impossible to compete with them. Their advertising budgets are thousands of times higher than mine.
Why did I reinvent this wheel? Can I bring something new to the industry? Does it make sense to fight in a battle I lost before I even started — tens of years ago?
All of these services have things in common — they offer similar functionality and they have a similar pricing policy — they all have a monthly subscription. It’s so strange in a modern world when servers have hourly-based pricing to have a monthly subscription service that really spends resources only when it makes a request. Why don’t we just have a fixed price for a single request? Then we could calculate the user’s monthly spendings based on how many requests were made.
That’s it! I want to make my service free, for those who do not need more than free_request_count requests every month. For example, I’m already using it for checking if some of my other services are online. It’s not that critical if I know my servers are down only after 1 hour — say hello to the magic of mirroring.
The price will depend on the cost of every request. I will be able to calculate the price of the request and a monthly number of free requests only when I have enough users. For now, the service is free for everyone, regardless of the number of requests per month you make.
This pricing policy adds flexibility. Let’s say you spend $10 a month making requests every minute. But do you need to make requests every minute? Does an extra minute matter to your business? If it does not, you can change the request frequency to every 2 minutes and your costs will be halved — $5. You can make a request every 5 minutes if your service does not need to be available every minute. Then you pay only $2 per month. Simple, isn’t it?
And that’s how isOnline was born — simple and awesome service (and absolutely free for now). I made the UI with simplicity in mind — without unnecessary elements that could distract you from the main features, and therefore I paid attention to details — usability, animation.
In addition to the main functionality — periodically checking if the site is available — I decided to add a manual check, as https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com has it, except it’s, of course, absolutely ad-free.
I also could think of another great feature no one offers, but I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s see how the service will float in the sea of competition. If it can swim — I will implement this additional feature and write about it.
So here it is — the service of uptime monitoring — isOnline — simple, but effective. Absolutely free and will stay that way for a while.
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Read this article on my blog
