What’s UpDown?

If you thought I was going to say “Not much, how about you?”, you were close!

UpDown saved my bacon this week. And it’s not because it started to smell 🥓.

As part of my web app interests I run a small app on Shopify, called Roasterly. This week my cloud hosting provider of choice, Fly.io, had some of their hosts go down and required emergency maintenance to repair.

Now, if you follow all their guides, they warn you that this can happen so in order to mitigate this and prevent downtime on your app you should run your service on at least two machines. Of course by this point I’ll let you guess how many I was running… you guessed it! One.

But it wasn’t Fly.io that notified me of this issue. It was UpDown.

I received an alert that my site was experiencing downtime hours before any user was aware of it. Though there wasn’t much I could do while Fly was making the repairs to the host running my Postgres database, I was able to get in front of the issue and not be blindsided by a customer email.

UpDown works simply by allowing you to configure an endpoint to check and how often you want to hit it. Their pricing model incredibly straight forward — one hit equals one credit.

If you use my referral link you will get 100,000 credits… allowing you to check two sites every hour for about 5 years before needing to pay. Or, you could check one site every 5 minutes for a year.

You can even configure a custom DNS for your status page, like mine for Roasterly. Yeah… that 97.78% uptime isn’t pretty 🙈.

I’m so glad I set this up a few years ago! I’m adding my other sites as well and will happily pay for some more credits.

Happy coding!