Recently we launched www.verelo.com which aims to be your one stop shop for website monitoring. We started coding in August 2011 and launched in Jan 2012, since then we’ve obtained a small amount of funding and are pushing ahead full speed with features.

Today Verelo covers website monitoring focusing on providing notifications by Phone, SMS and Email, along with detailed reporting and sub-minute checks. In the near future we’ll be launching our 911 emergency response service (think of this as an outbound conference solution that will try get everyone onto a call at once, and if unsuccessful at getting the person to pickup, they will be emailed conference dial in details). We’ll also be adding cool services like log aggregation so you can actually get real data about “why” your site is down, not just a notification stating that “its down”. Exciting times, so stay tuned!

We would love to get your feedback, so if you have a website, API, online store front or even just a blog you want to have monitored bounce over to Verelo.com and signup for a free account!

I’m excited to tell you that I’ve been trialing a new service called Cloudability. These guys address a very critical problem that we’ve been facing ever since VMware came to exist, how to monitor cost when servers are far too easy to make.

We’ve all been there. You rat through your Amazon, Rackspace (Who if you need cloud servers I would personally recommend you signup with) or Slicehost account only to find that there are 5-10 servers that are either containing peoples names or the word “test”. Each have been running for days if not weeks and no one claims to be using them any more. Well maybe not everyone hits this problem, but when it happens, its a serious issue. You’re paying for things you’re not using!

So what do we do about monitoring costs in the cloud? For some reason the companies offering cloud services have not bothered to make this easy for us. Amazon have consolidated billing (thats kind of cool…) and Rackspace have a billing section that shows stats about currently running instances but none of these offer any of the following (Which as someone managing these costs, i need to know):

• How much am i going to spend this month?
• What am i trending? Am i spending more each month or less? I need to make a yearly budget…
• What is each department of our company spending in the cloud?

It might come as a surprise to some but the ability to “Group” servers and report on the cost of each group would be an amazing feature! While this sounds real simple, its not possible at any of the providers I’ve mentioned so far which means if our CFO says “how much did X team spend this month?” i need to whip out excel and make some nasty calculations (which will be close but not perfect)

Whats the solution? Well you could write something custom using the API of your provider and do something like:

Cost = (uptime x hourly cost) + data charges + additional services*
*additional services may be additional IP’s or storage space

Again this doesnt sound hard but who has the time to write this? We’re busy enough trying to make our product better. Cloudability comes in and offers you some help here. Not only do they monitor all of your hosting costs, they can add a range of other services to the estimations and provide detailed reporting on them too.

Check out Cloudability, they’re in Beta right now and there is a waiting list but if you’re serious about understanding your cloud costs they look like the best place to start.

We’re at it all over again! Another crazy idea…only this time, its less crazy.

My friend Mike Curry of Blue74.com and I will be working together on our “Startup for startups”, tech startups to be specific. Having worked in tech companies, we think it makes sense. We regularly come across problems that we cannot find easy solutions to, only to run around inventing solutions to these problems just for ourselves. Recently we have both run into this far too often, so we’ve decided to go ahead and turn these little ideas into one big product, one big product that will be the one stop shop for startup tech companies who need software monitoring solutions.

I know you’re all saying “uh…Nagios?” but thats not where we’re headed with this. Nagios, or a similar tool, is just one key part of a good monitoring solution. Its just as important to have someone react to an issue, have a backup person should they not be available, and for that person (The one who finally responds) to have the ability to get the people they need assistance from on the phone in the shortest period of time possible. For this reason we will integrate with existing monitoring setups and provide an external point of reference, both of which will make sure you are well aware when something goes wrong regardless of where you.

Down time costs money, it costs customers and most of all…it just makes us all look bad. We address these problems in ways the Internet has never seen before, that’s what its all about. Stay tuned for more info.