wgc blog

Working at a startup, there is so much to take care of when it comes to technology. I’m the guy that people look to (i.e. yell and throw things at) when email doesn’t work, when the website is down, or when demos crash and burn. It can be a lot sometimes.

So, I’m embracing the whole DRY agile methodology thing and automating as much as possible with specific tasks watching the whole company for a specific aspect. Today, I signed up for an account with pingdom to monitor some of the more important websites that we have. Pingdom is a simple service that will check a website once a minute and send you an SMS if it is down. They have servers on 6 continents pinging away at my site. Oh, and here is a nice little tip, if you sign up for a trial account they will offer you an upgrade at 70% off the regular price. That means you can sign up for a full year at about $36.

So far, I’m happy with the interface and the functionality. It looks like they struck the right balance in terms of the features they offer. I have it keeping an eye on this site, the main wgrids site and our development server (which is not even running a website, so they just try to ping it.)

I’m thinking this could be a good thread of posts for me, about how to grow and automate the entire infrastructure for a small company. Next week, perhaps, I’ll talk about email.