HowFast Monitoring

This was long overdue, as the idea is from two years ago. I had prioritized other features before this one, and now is a good time: 65 teams and 130 users are using HowFast to monitor their servers, and I've realized that some are not paying as much attention to their performance as they would like. There are various reasons: they missed an alert for a rarely used service, and it's been down for a couple weeks before they realize it, or somehow their notifications are not configured properly and they didn't receive the alerts, or they do not belong to the engineering team and prefer to get a high-level overview of their uptime and response time rather than alerts.

All those people will now benefit for free from this new feature, and will receive a weekly (or monthly) report in their email, containing key performance metrics and tailored insights.

UPDATE: The first reports were sent this morning, and I'm pretty happy about the impact of this feature, as many teams have removed old monitors, added newer ones, tweaked their notifications settings and are now getting more value out of HowFast!

It took quite some time, but I finally closed my second customer, effectively doubling my monthly recurring revenue. As I'm offering discounts for yearly plans, all my customers have opted for this, which is not surprising as you usually need HowFast on the long term: you don't know if your server will go down next week or next year, but you definitely want to learn about it as fast as possible once it happens.

Hello Indie Hackers! I'm still getting used to this website, but I'm happy I found a way to share my progress as I improve HowFast and learn to be a better solo entrepreneur!

HowFast was born as a tool for my personal usage when I was working as a freelance for a company that had performance issues with their Messenger bot. One of the endpoints was taking about 8s to answer, which is waaaay too much. Before trying to improve it, I wanted a way to get a consistent and precise measure of the response time - before and after my attempts at improving the code. HowFast was born, and helped me understand which actions were the most efficient on the response time.

But that was in 2018: now HowFast has evolved into a self-service SaaS that given any URL, will monitor its availability and response time every 60s: you get detailed performance data and super fast notifications when something goes down.