10'000'000'000 processed pings
by Pēteris CauneHealthchecks.io is a monitoring service for cron jobs and scheduled tasks. It listens for "pings" (tiny HTTP requests sent by clients on a regular schedule) and sends out alerts whenever a client doesn't ping on time.
Currently Healthchecks.io is processing ~200 pings per second on average, with spikes to 2000+ pings/s at round hours. And, this morning, Healthhechks.io processed its 10'000'000'000th ping, a nice round number :-)
Each processed ping results in a database write operation. There's a fair amount of constant write activity on the database hosts but NVMe drives are amazing and there's still plenty of IOPS capacity. One thing I do watch out for is SSD wear out – with the current usage patterns a drive wears out in a less than a year.
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Hey @cuu508 congrats on the latest milestone.
Cron job monitoring is a crowded market with so many companies. What's worked best for you to capture customers?
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Thanks!
For Healthchecks.io, a big differentiator is the freemium model. The free plan lets you monitor 20 jobs (competitors typically offer 3 jobs, 1 job or no free plan at all, trial only). I regularly see users converting after being on the free plan for years. It takes patience, and obviously doesn't work if you want quick growth.
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Thanks for the reply @cuu508 . 20 jobs sound like alot but I can why that works as a key differentiator.
Companies use it for so long that they cant afford to lose it or it's become a part of their work life. Very smart and as you said it takes patience but patience that pays off well :)
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Yeah – by the time you hit the 20 cron job limit, you've built up experience and familiarity with the service. You might be using some of the niche features, or have set up custom integrations. If you're generally happy with the service, it's a reasonable choice to stick with what works.
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Exactly and the users also become ambassadors spreading the good word about the product within their working community. The ROI on word of mouth is incredible.
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