Healthchecks.io Blog
blog.healthchecks.io · Company blog · on HN since 2018
The Healthchecks.io blog is written by the solo developer of a cron monitoring service, covering hosting, email, outages and cron details.
What HN saysCommenters cite its notes on self-hosted transactional email as realistic and useful, and its hosting setup post for details like having no automatic failover.
18HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
23stories submitted
1.5Kstory points
7 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Notes on Self-Hosted Transactional Email6 people · 6 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 2What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software3 people · 375 points · first shared 2022 · 175 comments on HN
- 3About Tracking Cookies on Status.healthchecks.io3 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4Throughput Upgrade (With Train Illustrations)2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5Post-mortem: Database Outage on April 30, 20252 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 6One-man SaaS, 9 Years In1 people · 828 points · first shared 2024 · 214 comments on HN
- 7Schedule cronjob for the first Monday of every month, the funky way1 people · 125 points · first shared 2022 · 38 comments on HN
- 8How Debian cron handles DST transitions1 people · 87 points · first shared 2021 · 55 comments on HN
- 9Healthchecks.io Now Uses Self-Hosted Object Storage1 people · 18 points · first shared 2026 · 5 comments on HN
- 10We Moved Some Data to S31 people · 9 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Investigating Gmail’s “This message seems dangerous” (Solved)1 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 12An unsolved database latency issue of a 1-man Ops team1 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Monitoring My Ingress Sojourner Medal Using Healthchecks.io1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 14How Healthchecks Sends Signal Notifications1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 15Comparison of Cron Monitoring Services (November 2023)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
cornfieldlabs · 2025-07-04
Just 4 years ago, I was recommending Postmark to everyone who faced deliverability issues with sendgrid.
Who's the relatively better provider now?
Edit: A useful article about IP Warm up https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactiona…
troyvit · 2024-07-30
The notes on self-hosting[1], from somebody making $14k/month relying on Maddy, says it pretty realistically. The author goes into a fair amount of detail covering what he did and it sounds pretty simple compared to what it was ten years ago.
I'm not sure zealotry is the best way to push back against conventional wisdom, but otoh the parent comment didn't sound zealous to me.
In fact the more I read about Maddy[2] the more it seems to simplify running a mail server compared to when I did it back in the day. I mean you still have to worry about landing an IP address with a bad reputation but it takes care of soooo much of the rest of it.
[1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactiona…
[2] https://maddy.email/faq/
miken123 · 2021-08-20
It could very well be that your specific Javascript does not run automatically or does not run correctly. I see the same with one of our auto-submitting forms. I do not know whether or not that is intentional on Microsoft's part. But other users have had different experiencies, so be aware that Microsoft may 'fix' their issue on some day and all of a sudden all your users will start clicking/unsubscribing/whatevering automatically.
See https://blog.healthchecks.io/2019/12/preventing-office-365-atp-from-cl… for someone who did have this experience.
cuu508 · 2024-10-11
I am running my own SMTP for my SaaS. I used managed SMTP services, including SES, before. It took be roughly 2 months to get it all set up: research the SMTP server options, trial a few of them, pick one, learn it thoroughly, write deployment scripts, deploy it, switch email traffic over to it gradually to warm up the sending IP, and monitor it. Blogged about it here: https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactiona…
If you are starting from zero, and are not running in production yet, I suppose it's easier as you can afford to make mistakes and lose some email. I had to measure everything 7 times, and still had one major oh-no event :-)
killingtime74 · 2024-07-30
Further here (https://blog.healthchecks.io/2022/02/healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-202… it says no auto fail over.
metadat · 2024-07-29
The linked email story was also interesting:
https://blog.healthchecks.io/2023/08/notes-on-self-hosted-transactiona…
The author's end solution goes against all common HN wisdom (!)
This is the way things should work. There should be millions of email senders and receivers, not just 32 mafiosas (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, MailChimp, etc).
There are endless counter-examples on HN advocating against hosting something as simple as email yourself, see: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=self-host+email