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A comment on Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime monitoring. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime mon... by geerlingguy on Monday December 10, 2012 @04:53PM (#4901724)
Server 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 how they're supporting that, unless they have alternative revenue streams.

- Database bandwidth/storage for more than a few servers costs money—I've calculated at least a few MB/month/server, meaning the data storage and access is a real cost I have to find money for.

Finally, they mention on their about page that they won't do paid until at least Feb. 2013, so I don't know if they'll still be free after that anyways :-/

(This is not to say I don't think their service is bad or anything—I think it looks like a worthy alternative... it's just not what I wanted to use, otherwise, I wouldn't have built Server Check.in.)

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Re:Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime mon... by scottksmith95 on Monday December 10, 2012 @04:57PM (#4901739)
Thanks for your response and kudos to a very clean UI, powerful feature set, and low cost.

You are correct, they are using email-to-SMS gateways.

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Re:Show HN: Server Check.in - inexpensive website uptime mon... by geerlingguy on Monday December 10, 2012 @05:03PM (#4901761)
Sure 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.

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