I've finally taken the plunge and got my first startup out of the starting blocks. It's been live for a week now and I've been adding new features almost daily. I'd really appreciate any feedback. http://nimbu.net/
I am a Pingdom customer and I think the thing that could make me shift is an enhanced form of custom check - like what Pingdom has today but better.<p>In my setup I made a public service where external tools can retrieve some realtime stats like current number of users, queue lengths, number of jobs processing etc. Pingdom uses this service in different custom checks and it kinda works, but I can't use the stats or graphs for anything. Not all checks should be described in a status code and response time - a simple number would be great. Make graphs with that and allow users to set a threshold for when alerts should be sent.<p>Another thing missing is support for basic authentication.<p>As others have noted your front page is not really getting the message through.
"Sign up" is two words.<p>After three sites, I was told I needed to upgrade. Clicking said link did nothing. But can still add sites by going to <a href="http://nimbu.net/addresses/new" rel="nofollow">http://nimbu.net/addresses/new</a>; an error is presented, but the site is added anyway.<p>Calling redirects failed is problematic; for example, try monitoring <a href="http://www.google.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/</a> The non-US pingers will always fail due to country redirects. And <a href="http://www.google.com/ncr" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/ncr</a> won't work either, because it always redirects.
Why aren't you charging money? Excuse me for being blunt, but this is seriously silly - your purpose is to find if anyone will pay, right?<p>Also, one feature I myself would pay money for is sha256 validation of the content of specified files (html, js etc). Since I'm using AJAX I don't really have a problem with dynamic content. I want to be notified when/if my site is defaced. I will pay $5/month and consider it a real bargain, if you have multiple monitoring locations to make it hard for defacers to serve selective content.
"Use of Customer’s Name and Company Name<p>Nimbu reserves the right to use your name and/or company name as a reference for marketing or promotional purposes on the Nimbu.com website and other communication with existing or potential Nimbu customers. To decline Nimbu this right you need to email help@nimbu.net stating that you do not wish to be used as a reference."<p>This is completely unreasonable. You want me to email you to decline the right! You should have to _ask_ ME for the right!
It seems to me that the only thing you monitor is the domain name, like pingdom. If this is the case, maybe you should make it clearer.<p>If not, you should make that clearer too. When I think of site monitor, what I want is to be able to monitor my hdd, cpu usage, ram spikes, main domains, etc. E.g. similar to serverdensity.com's offering.<p>Add some more info about exactly what you offer, and the cost. I know it says free on the sign-up page, but you should make it clear on the main page that this is a beta period.<p>Good job on actually launching though. Many people don't even make it that far!
Your Pricing and Signup link is deceiving. You should separate the pricing since that what I expect to see when I click on that link.<p>Other than that, I think the idea is straight forward and decently presented. I would like you to highlight on that front page what makes you different (read: exceptional) than other providers.
It has been interesting reading the recent getting users thread [<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902322" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902322</a>] as I've been trying a lot of the methods on there to gain some traction, so far without much success. Any other tips?
Something simple - Add margin to the left side. It is very hard to read with the text up against the edge of the browser.<p>It would be good to understand the location of the server(s) doing the monitoring.