Announcing Nine9s.cloud 🎉

I'm super excited to announce the release of Nine9s, a service providing simple, no-fuss uptime monitoring for developers on a budget. Whether you're a hobbyist with a blog, an indie-dev working on some side projects, or a small dev shop, Nine9s is here to make sure your site is up and responsive for your users and to alert you of any slowdowns or outages.

I've used Uptime Monitoring services for years, but I've always been left slightly dissatisfied. There's lots of great services out there and they do a lot of stuff, but they either feel like overkill, cost way too much, or don't quite do what I need. That's why I built Nine9s.

If you're in the market for inexpensive, but powerful, Uptime Monitoring, then please check out Nine9s. You can even get started for free and see what it has to offer, and check out the roadmap for what's coming.

Nine9s.cloud: No-fuss Uptime Monitoring for Developers →

Nine9s and the Environment

Nine9s is the first service I've ever run that's powered by servers outside the U.S., and there's a reason for that. I care about the environment and about mitigating the effects of Climate Change (I'm a vegetarian for some of the same reasons). I've always preferred to use Linode for my hosting and while they have lots of datacenters in the U.S., none have committed to using energy from clean and renewable sources; though, their datacenters in Europe do.

I've written up a whole explanation about how and why Nine9s is hosted in London as well as calculating the environmental impact of running the service, and I hope you check it out. Running a small service like Nine9s off of green energy isn't really going to make a big difference in the world, but it's not going to actively make things worse either, and that's what matters.

From Idea to Launch in Two Weeks

I've had the idea for Nine9s for years, but I'd never gotten around to actually building out the service. Besides the fact that I never do anything until I have a domain name, I'd just never had the time. That has changed recently.

On May 27th, exactly two weeks ago, I bought the domain nine9s.cloud and got to work. Everything you see was built and designed in that time. This is the fastest I've ever launched a commercial product, and I don't think I could really do it again. Nine9s is a fairly simple service, and I ripped most of the infrastructure from Pine.blog which made getting started really trivial. That said, I'm really amazed just how quickly I was able to put everything together. I took very few shortcuts, wrote good code, and spent a good chunk of time designing and implementing the service; I don't think it's what I did that matters, it's what I didn't do. Nine9s has no dynamic front-end, it runs on one server, it uses tools I know by heart, and it does one job and does it well.