It was a lot of fun developing UptimeButler and we learned a lot. For the actual web app we decided to give Meteor a try. The hardest part there was, that some packages contain a lot of "magic" :) But in the end, we had a pretty good feeling what we could use out of the box and what had to be done by hand.
For the workers which perform the availability checks, we use C# applications running on Linux with Mono. Fortunately we got into the BizSpark program from Microsoft, which allows us to launch our public beta with very little private equity.
we are following HN on a regular basis and we are quite impressed with the quality feedback. Today we want to show our own product.
Yes, it's another time tracking software. BUT we are freelancing for about 5 years and we found it pretty hard to find a decent time tracking software which is not terribly complicated but still has all the features needed for freelancers or small companies. That's why we decided to build SpikeTime.