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How to get your first ten customers

It'll soon be the third anniversary of publicly launching OnlineOrNot on Twitter, and I often get asked what I did to get my first paying customers - so I felt like sharing. I assume when most folks ask this that they're looking for the one thing they can do to finally start getting paid customers. Let me be clear: it's never just one thing.

Scaling AWS Lambda and Postgres to thousands of simultaneous uptime checks

When you're building a serverless web app, it can be pretty easy to forget about the database. You build a backend, send some data to a frontend, write some tests, and it'll scale to infinity with no effort, right? Not quite. Especially not with a tiny Postgres server. As the number of users of your frontend increases, your app will open more and more database connections until the database is unable to accept any more. That's just the frontend - it gets worse on the backend.

Ways to avoid losing your domain

Imagine you're sitting in your office, and you start noticing emails coming in asking if you'd like to buy your domain. "Huh, that's weird, I already own that domain" you think to yourself. A few more emails come in, and they're getting past the spam filter, so you decide to double check your domain manager. Doubt starts creeping into your mind, you start panicking, and you frantically scroll down to where the domain should be, and... It's gone.

Our lessons from the latest AWS us-east-1 outage

In case you missed it, AWS experienced an outage or "elevated error rates" on their AWS Lambda APIs in the us-east-1 region between 18:52 UTC and 20:15 UTC on June 13, 2023. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's almost a replay of what happened on December 7, 2021, although that outage was significantly more severe and took longer to restore.

No, the average cost of downtime is not $5600 per minute

A fairly common claim among website uptime monitoring services is that downtime costs $5600 per minute. Chances are, you'll have one of two reactions to this claim: The reality of what downtime costs your business lies somewhere in between. As a company that runs 3.6 million uptime checks per week, we have a bit of insight into the cost of downtime, so if you're curious - read on.