The team behind updown.io, a website monitoring service, writes about the service, Ruby performance, cron monitoring, and spam filtering.
HN commenters recommend updown.io as good-value monitoring that checks SSL expiry, with a generous free tier and status pages.
I run https://updown.io since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about $6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or airbnb.
updown.io also has a relatively new feature called cron monitoring[0] that allows you to regularly check in to signal success. If there has been no check-in in a configured time it will alert you. For backups you could add a simple curl somewhere into your backup process to do just that.
[0] https://updown.io/doc/how-pulse-cron-monitoring-works
I noticed on my server that the latest version of certbot (CLI tool for LetsEncrypt) broke my automatic renewal script.
This happened after the snap did an unattended update.
I had to replace the --webroot parameter with --nginx
Luckily I had monitoring [1] in place to alert me beforehand
1. https://updown.io/
In a busy market, distribution is king. It's hard to get your name out there.
Speaking of unknown players in this space, check out the wonderfully minimalistic updown.io. It's much cheaper than SP and really is quite good.
Here's our dashboard: https://updown.io/szug
I've started using `serveo.net` to monitor my internet uptime (Raspberry Pi with a simple webserver, [updown.io](https://updown.io) to request it via [serveo.net](https://serveo.net)) but they were unavailable/offline for ~4 days within the last 10 days.
In case anyone finds this later: I've searched more, by looking at demo pages of popular status monitoring tools hoping to find GitHub, and I've found one such demo: https://updown.io/d043