Posted on November 9th, 2010 by DNN Montior
DNN Monitor In Cloud
Time flies! DNN Monitor was launched on January 1st, 2010 and it's almost time for its first birthday.In under an year, DNN Monitor has become really popular service within DotNetNuke ecosystem and currently monitors over 4800 DotNetNuke Sites.
Honestly, when the service was launched earlier this year, we didn't anticipate such a huge demand and we were not prepared to scale our resources accordingly. Several times this year our monitor servers were exhausted and went offline or our hosting providers pulled the plug on us for "excessive use of resources". Even though we had our set of dedicated servers, visiting nearly 5000 sites every 5 minutes does consume a lot of processing power, bandwidth, and storage for statistics.
We changed Data Centers twice in last 2 months to meet the ongoing demand. Finally, I'm happy to announce that our servers have moved to Cloud to meet our current clientbase and scale in future as need be. In this one year, we learned many lessons, some the hard way, for developing, maintaining, and scaling high scale applications. We hope that with our latest move to the Cloud, our clients will experience much more stable and reliable DNN Monitor service.
Needless to say, DNN Monitor costs us a fortune every month. Bandwitdh, Parallel Processing, and Storage does comes with a cost. Therefore, it's essential for us to make few changes to continue to provide this service to everyone and not incur losses. So far, we've been offering our service for free and we will continue to do so. However, we feel that certain users such as small businesses, website integrators / developers, and other hosting providers have been abusing our free services. We have few users with as many as 80 sites monitored under a single account. I feel it's time for DNN Monitor to charge these customers a nominal fee to continue to provide them with this service. Early next year, we will likely make several changes to our DNN Monitor service including but not limited to:
- Free Accounts will be limited to 2 DotNetNuke Sites Only
- Paid Accounts will have additional benefits such as
- Notification Services if their site goes does or come back online
- Via Email
- Via iPhone Application & Real-time Push Alerts
- Via Windows Phone Application & Real-time Push Alerts
- Via Desktop Gadgets for Windows Vista & Windows 7
We have not finalized any pricing yet and your suggestions are very welcome. Please use the contact us form to provide feedback.
In addition to paid features, we also plan to add several more features for all users. Over the course of next few days, we will add an option for each user to specify their own preferred timezone. All the reports, statistics, and real-time status will then report the time in the user's preferred timezone. Since we have users all over the world, this is the most requested feature. Currently all date and time shown is in GMT.
Well it has been a fun year and we look forward to even more interesting 2011 for DNN Monitor.
Mandeep Singh
Founder & Chief Developer