Downtime Monkey

Downtime Monkey has reached a significant milestone - 100 Pro subscribers. 2 new paying customers arrived on New Years Day which got us over the line.

It's been a good month and it's nice to see that Downtime Monkey continues to grow at a steady pace and that the service is growing under its own steam with very little input from me at this point.

Here are the figures:

Verified Users: 3515
Active Users: 1398
Paying Pro Users: 101

Downtime Monkey just broke through the $500 per month for the first time:

https://www.indiehackers.com/product/downtime-monkey/revenue

I'm really pleased with this as although growth is not meteoric (it launched over 3 years ago) it is steady.

The best part is that Downtime Monkey is growing despite no new development for the past year and needs very little upkeep. It just ticks over and does it's thing.

It's not quite time to crack the champagne and I do have some plans for new features in the future but for now I am happy with this steady growth.

Here are the figures:

Verified Users: 2381
Active Users: 1123
Paying Pro Users: 86

It is good to see customers continue to increase since the new year. It hasn't been astronomical, but a steady growth of both Free and Pro users.

I'm quite happy with it because I haven't had time to develop any new features in quite some time. Just the odd customer support email to deal with.

I do have a new feature planned but it will be a little while before I can get to it.

Here are the figures:

Verified Users: 2074
Active Users: 1168
Paying Pro Users: 77

Downtime Monkey now logs more than 4 million website responses each day. I ran some analysis on these to see how fast websites respond in practice.

I collected 1 million response times from real websites. Half a million from Pro plans and half a million from Free plans.

I then split these into groups: 0 to 1 second, 1 to 2 seconds, 2 to 3 seconds etc. and then counted the number in each group. For responses slower than 17 seconds a site is considered down:

The majority of sites responded within a second, so I took another sample and broke the fastest sites into groups of a quarter of a second:

I also crunched the numbers to find the average response time for all sites, the top 10%, the bottom 10% and how the percentage of sites are down at a given moment. You can see these in the blog post:

https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/a-quick-study-of-response-time.php

Downtime Monkey's early-bird discount has been in place for 3 years and is scheduled to end in November.

So I wrote a short blog and sent a mailshot to subscribers to let them know that now was a good time to go Pro or Upgrade their account as the discount is locked-in for 36 months from the time of the original purchase.

We received a few purchases and upgrades from this. Here are the stats:

Verified Users: 1725
Active Users: 998
Paying Pro Users: 62

MRR is up to approx $240 - not bringing home the bacon yet but a step in the right direction.

https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/early-bird-discount-ending-soon.php

August has been a tough month.

I spent days battling a barrage of bad bots that are clever enough to pass Google reCaptcha and verify their email (more on this later).

A new feature I launched early in the month didn't receive as much traction as I hoped.

A bunch of minor issues have prevented me getting on with developing the next new feature.

And my kids' school has been flooded so we're all off school... again :(

However, Downtime Monkey just crossed 50 Pro customers. This almost makes it worth it. Make it 100 and I'd say it is :)

Here are the Stats:

Verified Users: 1496 (possibly inaccurate due to bots)
Active Users: 875
Paying Pro Users: 51

Since our plans are really low price (heavily discounted at the moment) this gives MRR of about $150 or so with some extra from one-off payments.

I'll not give up the day job just yet but little steps.

The stats overview page that I launched in June was well received and led to several new Pro customers. So I've followed up on this and developed a similar idea for downtime logs.

Previously you could view logs for every monitor individually. They weren't hard to find if you were looking for them... but if you weren't looking you might never know they existed.

Users were probably missing out on a useful feature without even being aware.

So I've put all the Downtime Logs on one page with a link to it bang in the top menu of the dashboard. You can't miss it now.

It makes sense that the most viewed logs are usually the most recent - you generally want to dig into these if there has been a recent outage with your sites or servers. So you're shown all the logs for the last 24 hours with the latest downtimes shown first.

You can also filter logs to just show individual sites, change the timespan to show logs for up to 2 years and export logs to a CSV file. This can come in handy if you need to provide evidence of downtimes to customers or a hosting provider.

You can see full details in the blog post: https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/website-downtime-logs.php

I've made an improvement to Downtime Monkey alerts.

Each downtime alert now includes a timestamp that shows the time that the website went down and each uptime alert includes a timestamp that shows the time that the website came back up.

This turned out to be more work than expected, largely because I thought I'd knock it out in under an hour :)

It required small changes to scripts the whole way through the monitoring system so although each change was straightforward, overall it took some time.

The end-result is identical timestamps included in all alerts (email, slack, SMS) that also match the downtimes shown in the downtime logs.

The main benefit is that you'll see exactly when the website was down, at a glance, as soon as you view an alert.

Full details on the blog: https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/timestamps-on-downtime-alert.php

Just rolled out a new 'Stats Overview' area at Downtime Monkey where you can view a summary of the stats for all your monitors at a glance.

There have been several requests for this feature from customers who want to view the most important stats for all their websites in one place.

The main advantage is that you can see the pertinent uptime and response time figures in a split second, immediately becoming aware of any problems without having to click between pages.

For more details, see the blog...

https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/stats-overview-feature.php

In early March we noticed an increase in the overall number of downtimes logged at Downtime Monkey. This was when COVID-19 related lockdowns were beginning in many countries so we decided to dig into the data to see if there was a correlation.

Results were interesting and showed a strong correlation, with the number of downtimes increasing significantly around the dates that lockdowns began.

For full details see the blog post:

https://downtimemonkey.com/blog/effect-of-covid-19-lockdown-on-website-downtime.php