OnlineOrNot Diaries 24
Max Rozen (@RozenMD) / January 24, 2025
It's Friday morning, the days are getting longer, and the weather better here in Toulouse. Let's go into some thoughts from the past few weeks.
About last year
I wrote up my product-focused 2024 wrap up for OnlineOrNot a few weeks back and I'm still planning on writing a more business-focused "what I learned from four years of running a SaaS" to mark OnlineOrNot's fourth birthday.
A good summary of 2024 for me is: I spent way too much time worrying about feature gaps in the product (the status page product had many), and not enough time marketing.
For example, I built out ten changelog-worthy features, and took the time to add none of them to my landing page. Useful for existing customers (since they become aware of these features through the changelog + product update newsletter), but from the perspective of interested prospects visiting the landing page, the feature gap is still there.
So the goal of 2025 is to take a more balanced approach between marketing and coding. Instead of rushing off to the next feature, take the time to update the landing page as well as the docs, changelog, and product newsletter.
First incident of the year
Last week OnlineOrNot had its first incident of the year: uptime checks were moving slower through the pipeline than usual, meaning checks that should run every 30 seconds were running every 5 minutes or so. I spent the end of last year tweaking the system to ensure this would never happen, but I missed a spot.
The postmortem probably says it best:
The root cause was a loss of connectivity between our Cloudflare Workers service, and the AWS database that stores metadata about uptime checks. There was a replica system ready to run in AWS, however due to a misconfiguration it could not start automatically.
The misconfiguration has been fixed, and OnlineOrNot will run regular (monthly) drills to ensure the fallback system functions as expected.
I was also more than an hour away from my laptop when my PagerDuty alert fired, so that'll also teach me to bring my laptop with me. That's something folks don't realize about starting a SaaS that other businesses rely on - you're always on-call (until you hire folks to help):
