Bitping is a platform that utilizes a global network of nodes to monitor the uptime and performance of websites and online services. It rewards users for participating in the network by sharing their device's resources, such as bandwidth and processing power.
I didn’t have much experience developing for Blockchain before Bitping, besides some internal tools at one of my previous companies. We were looking at building a contract/document management system that was backed by physical file and signature storage on Bitcoin.
In 2019, my team won a Bitcoin Association hackathon where they created the concept of a network monitoring company powered by micropayments. I was contacted shortly after and was instantly interested. At the time, I was working at a company and had recently experienced downtime that our uptime monitoring tool didn’t detect as they were running on the same cloud as we were. Turns out our clients were not able to reach our website for half a day, leading to many lost leads and sales, this really highlighted the value that Bitping brings to the network monitoring space.
Starting a company from nothing was pretty daunting, I had built products and applications before but building an entire company comes with a lot more work than I gave it credit for.
Bitping helps users in different ways depending on their role. As a network monitoring service, Bitping provides clients with a comprehensive view of how their websites and services are performing from the perspective of their customers. This is achieved through a decentralized and distributed network of nodes, which are personal devices running Bitping software. The nodes gather information and send it to Bitping servers, allowing clients to see how their services are performing in real-time.
One of the key benefits of using Bitping over competitors is that it offers a more accurate view of performance as it gathers information from real users rather than just a few data centers, this comes with the benefit of providing insight into how your service is performing on a variety of Internet Service Providers, Devices and Internet capabilities. Additionally, the nodes themselves can benefit from running Bitping software as it provides a new revenue source by monetizing their excess bandwidth. This is particularly valuable for nodes in less well-off areas where every dollar counts.
We are currently working on a new Bitping Node that has the capability and flexibility for further service expansion, which can range from bandwidth sharing, compute functions and other network testing functionality.
We are constantly looking for cryptocurrencies and other services that can facilitate micropayments. Some that come to mind are USDC-SOL, USDT-TRX and TRX. However, we are happy to even add payment services outside of cryptocurrency provided that the fees are sufficiently low so as not to prevent withdrawals of smaller amounts. At the end of the day, we’d like to pay our network in whatever method of payment works best for them, even if that means Frequent Flyer points, that’s something worth looking into.
We are in the process of simplifying our node installation process across a slew of devices and operating systems, on top of this we are fleshing out our FAQs/Help pages to provide further support for commonly faced issues. Our new help page is at https://help.bitping.com, expect it to be updated frequently with topics ranging from getting new nodes started, cashing out your earnings and how to use Bitping as a service for network monitoring.
On this front, I definitely think there is more that can be done on the education front to explain to tinkerers, developers, IT & DevOps professionals how to leverage the Bitping services more to create new tools that otherwise couldn’t exist without our distributed network.
I think the centralisation of services such as DNS are the obvious choice, the failure of DNS has spurred the development of many Web3 technologies that seem poised to replace it with a more robust solution.
During a time of constant outages, and most recently of the time of writing, OpenAI’s API had an outage taking hundreds of new AI based tools down. I think it’s important to figure out ways to keep your business online, either by reducing dependence on external services or building out robust failover solutions and disaster recovery environments. No matter the solution you choose, as long as the internet stands as it currently does, monitoring services such as Bitping will be paramount to ensuring your customers receive the smoothest experience possible when interacting with your business.
When you’re building a product, solve the problem for the 95%, the last 5% always takes the longest to build so ensure you get to market fast and validate your idea before committing to spending the rest of that time.
