A startup called Verelo is introducing a new type of website monitoring service, which plans to commoditize features like uptime and performance monitoring, with plans to give away as much of those services for free as possible. Instead, Verelo’s premium offerings will focus on other areas, including malware detection and site health, as well as a recommendations feature aimed at the less tech-savvy. This latter feature will observe the site and suggest changes site owners can make and services they can add to cut down on frustrations.
Explains co-founder Andrew McGrath, who previously worked at Syncapse prior to creating Verelo with co-founder Mike Curry, the company’s tagline is “Verelo wants to make the internet a better place.” He said the idea for the service was born out of frustration with existing offerings – and there are many: Pingdom, Uptrends, New Relic, AlertFox – to name just a few.
“Everybody focuses on uptime and performance monitoring,” says McGrath, “because that’s an important place to be. But the reality is, it’s a small feature, even though it’s very important. The direction we’re taking Verelo is more of ‘what’s worse than your site being down?’ Well, it’s your site being hacked and serving up malicious content.”
So while Verelo is offering the traditional monitoring services, they will be just a part of the overall lineup going forward. “When people are thinking about uptime and performance reporting, we want them to think not just of uptime, we want them thinking ‘is my site doing the right thing? Is my site healthy?,'” says McGrath.
Another part of Verelo’s service outside of reporting and malware detection, is a “911” emergency call feature to help affected sites immediately get back on track. They’ve also build a WordPress plugin that can help blog owners watch their sites for malware. One step up from the free level of service, in fact, is a package aimed at bloggers for just $2.00/month. And even at these lower tiers, Verelo is shrinking the time between checks to 5 seconds (compared with 60+ seconds on the free levels of other professional services).
There are also features aimed at non-technical business users. Specifically, Verelo wants to help monitor and catch all those little things that technical folks know need to be done, but regular people generally have no idea about. Some examples: Verelo could flag when a SSL certificate or domain was about to expire, or it could recommend you create an SPF record, or sign up for a service that can help you improve your site’s load times. On that last front, Verelo may either offer the service itself (ideally) or partner with a company it recommends. Current partners include CloudFlare (also soon a reseller) and PagerDuty, for example.
“Where it makes sense we’ll partner, and where it does not we’ll build,” McGrath says. But the direction the company is heading is to aggregate services and make recommendations. Part of this will involve a site owner’s dashboard, set to go live shortly (pictured below).
The company, founded in January 2012, is currently participating in the Extreme Startups accelerator. Verelo exited its private beta in April and is now making its public debut ahead of Extreme Startups’ demo day. You can use the discount code LAUNCH for 25% off if you’re interested in checking it out yourself.
