Josh Russell

Services that monitor websites for downtime are not new. Do a Google search for server monitoring and you’ll find hundreds of links to many competing companies. So surely starting a new monitoring service must be like opening a new car dealership next door to BMW’s store on Park Lane?

But what if you’re selling Smart cars?

PingBase is a more efficient, modern and affordable car. A car designed for not only the driver but it’s environment and the cohabitants of that environment.

All these monitoring services certainly do their job, although I’ve not used them all, so what’s wrong with them?

1. The Price
   They are prohibitively expensive. usually charging around $10/month per domain or URL you want to monitor.
2. The Free Trial
   You might get a month for free or maybe longer but for a much lower level of service.
3. Access to data
   Few provide an API or even RSS, although around half offer multiple person notification lists of some sort.
4. They’re not designed for everyone
   Most are designed for web developers or large corporations, they ignore the needs of the majority of websites and their owners.

I think that last point may be the most important. Everybody and their fathers brothers have a website and they all need to know the uptime, or downtime of their sites. A persons blog is a very important thing. Some livelihoods are made from blogs as well as reputations built from them.

If your blog is down, you need to know! But you shouldn’t have to pay more than it costs you to have the website for that knowledge.

Enter PingBase, a modern website monitor built for you, your friends, your company or your rabbit.

If you want to monitor your blog, PingBase will do that, for free, forever. If you want more, then you can upgrade to the first level which will allow you to monitor 10 URLs for $15/month with the added bonus of receiving SMS (text messages) as well as email when your site goes down.

There is an FAQ that should answer more of your questions, and you can sign up to know when it’s launched from any page on the site.

I’m really excited to get this up and running, I’ve been looking forward to announcing it.. I know it’ll be a useful addition to many peoples online lives.

So where did web 2.0 come from? I’ve just signed up for Andy’s conference, d:construct, and I’m quite excited. Not because it’s going to be interesting to hear about everybody’s projects and how they wrote and, I guess, are marketing them, but because, I want to hear what Web 2.0 means to people. I hope that these are the people that will help me understand what all the fuss is about.

I consider us to be at Web 1.5, and that in itself is generous.

To compare it to mobile phone technology, Web 0.5 (web beta?) was analogue GSM, 1G, which then became digital, or 2G, then we added GPRS as an interim fix while we all waited for 3G. GPRS became known as 2.5G. it didn’t do a lot more, but maybe a bit quicker, ok and the pricing structure was a bit different… Maybe this isn’t the best analogy…

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