Ask IH: Would you pay for a service that would monitor the most crucial parts of your website?
I've been playing with an idea to offer test automation service for startups. To start with, the service would monitor the sign up and/or login process on a website by running an automated test once a day. In case of failure it would send a mail to the owner.
Is this something you'd be willing to pay for?
I’ve been running a monitoring business (API mostly with some UI along the way) and it’s a decent business IF (and this is a big if) you have the chops to be more reliable than your customers. Once they start paying you for being the first indication of a problem, you better be near 100% available. That takes a lot of investment to achieve and you’ll be on-call 24/7.
Also, once a day isn’t often enough to demand enough money to make it worth it.
The actual monitoring tech is easy though so if you have a unique take on it, give it a shot and see if you can work out the reliability and marketing challenges.
I feel like for monitoring, that is something most platforms should provide by default. Handling the crisis of a service failure, however, I feel like everyone would and should pay dearly for.
What if you provided a simple generic backup sign-up service that kicks in whenever someone's site is down?
Tools I'm using which do the job and do it well:
Yandex.metrika - uptime monitoring
Rollbar - for site errors, like your login example for instance
Skylight - for code/database bottlenecks
So.. no.
I doubt if many IndieHackers will be willing to pay for this as they would prefer spending money on their product and market validation.
On the other hand, large enterprises are highly risk averse and probably might buy such a service if they see any value in it.
I would suggest you to target website where you think number of signups or logins are in 100's.
Yes, I can imagine people who just launched their products would not be the target market. The target audience would probably be small to medium size websites that already generate some sort of revenue.
In case of large enterprises, they typically have their own DevOps teams doing this kind of monitoring.
Thanks for your comments!
There are many services offering uptime monitoring free.
This is the one I have been using for years:
https://uptimerobot.com
Hey Markus, does this mean you wouldn't pay for an uptime monitoring service? or would it need to do something additional that free monitors don't provide?
I probably would not pay for a monitoring service when many sites offer it free.
I cannot think of anything as a value add that would get me to pay for it. Even SMS would not appeal to me, because I get notifications on phone when I get an email.
Actually, there is one way I would pay... to automatically display a "site down for xxx" static page when my site was down... like Status.io offers.
The service I have in mind would go one step further and monitor not only uptime but the actual functionality (e.g. is the sign up / login form working?).
I'd consider paying for something that monitors bottlenecks at crucial parts of the user flow eg. registration flow or payment flow. Assuming that the site won't suddenly break too often, and the service would be more like an insurance, I wouldn't pay much. Also, it is tricky, because then I'd hate whenever I hear from you, since it is linked to my site being broken. If my site is never broken, I might feel I am paying for nothing. All kinds of bad feelings associated with your product :(
If the integration tests running on the CI didn't catch any bugs before deploying a version to production, why would the sign in/up stop working all of a sudden after that? (that's the question that came to my mind while reading about your idea).
I also use UptimeRobot to have external validations that the servers ping, the web services return the correct status and the pages contains some specific strings.
Your idea would kind of regularly rerun some of my integration tests on the production servers to make sure everything is still running as it should be. It's interesting, I wouldn'd pay for it but maybe some bigger businesses would.