Update: July 24, 2022
We saw little update on SpeedSentry and note that around the same time we released SpeedSentry that the number of players in the market ballooned. While our goal was only to share our work at a level that covered our costs, we saw virtually no uptake and very little customer interest.
Since SpeedSentry is not our core product, we have decided to take SpeedSentry private, using it internally, but not investing the time required to productize it.
We are in the process of making most of the source code for SpeedSentry available on Github. You are welcome to deploy SpeedSentry. We only ask that you share any bug fixes and improvements you have made. Within the next few weeks, you will find the source code multiple projects under https://github.com/inesonic/.
Below is the contents of the original blog post announcing SpeedSentry…
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With so many site monitoring services out there, you may be asking why we decided to create Inesonic SpeedSentry.
We needed a tool for monitoring our own infrastructure, including some of our backend servers. As a small business, we recognize that other small businesses simply can’t justify paying $20/month, $30/month, or even $60/month simply to know that their site is operating smoothly. As a small business owner, you’re likely paying $10 or less each month to host your WordPress site. Being asked to pay more than double your hosting costs just to know your site’s running well and hasn’t been defaced is simply unreasonable. Conversely, as a small business owner, you shouldn’t be at a disadvantage compared to larger players simply because of your limited ability to scale…. Why should only the largest players in your market have the advantages provided by site monitoring tools.
Implementing a site monitoring system is not difficult, that’s why there are so many companies now offering this service. A very basic site monitoring system *could* be implemented using nothing more than an AWS EventBridge rule and an AWS lambda function; however, many small businesses either don’t have the technical expertise to do this and/or don’t want to invest the time.
At Inesonic, we realized that we already had much of infrastructure developed that we could quickly repurpose to implement a simple, robust, and feature rich site monitoring system. This included infrastructure that allowed us to drive our operating costs down significantly without compromising what we felt were key features, such as redundancy, tracking site latency, and fast notification in the event of a failure. To that we’ve added several additional features that we felt or our small group of beta testers indicated would be useful.
We decided to invest the time and effort to build out our solution into a viable tool that other small businesses could benefit from. We also decided that we would charge our customers what we felt was a reasonable price to run and maintain our tool, nothing more. We would be happy so long as SpeedSentry can pay for itself and provide ongoing value to our customers.
Enjoy !
Post photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels
