The test that costs nothing and finds everything
Run this experiment this weekend: do not touch your project for 48 hours. No SSH, no log-checking, no restarts. Then come back and answer three questions:
- Did anything crash — and did you find out without checking?
- Did anything silently stop (backups, renewal, cron), and would you have noticed before a customer did?
- Could a stranger with your runbook recover it?
If you can't answer all three confidently, you don't have a project — you have a pet that needs feeding.
The 4 failure modes the test always finds
1. The disk filled up
Logs are the classic. Guard: a 5-line cron that alerts when usage crosses 85%, and logrotate configured before you need it.
2. The cert expired at 2 a.m. Sunday
Your monitoring was inside the box that died. Guard: external uptime check + expiry check 14 days out (echo | openssl s_client -connect host:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -enddate).
3. The backup was succeeding into a dead bucket
Job ran, exit 0, bytes went nowhere — credentials rotated two months ago. Guard: restore drill monthly. A backup you've never restored is a rumor.
4. You are the single point of failure
Nobody else has the password, the runbook, or the mental model. Guard: a one-page runbook per critical flow — what it does, how to check it's alive, how to restart it, who to call.
The cheapest possible setup that passes the test
- One cron that pings a dead-man's-switch URL on success (silence = alarm)
- One external monitor on the public URL
- One log-rotation config you tested once
- One runbook page per service
- One calendar reminder for a monthly restore drill
That's under an hour of setup and it covers ~80% of the ways solo projects die quietly.
What I package for teams that want the shortcut
I've been distilling this into a set of starter kits — the monitoring scripts, the runbook templates, and the failure-mode checklists, pre-written:
- Ops Starter Kit — monitoring + runbook framework for tiny teams
- Automation Starter Pack — the cron/heartbeat/backup guard patterns with exact commands
- Agent Ops 24/7 — running autonomous ops without a staff
If you're pre-revenue, run the free test first. If you've got paying users, stop gambling on your own attention.
Run the 48-hour test this weekend. Write down what breaks. That list is your real roadmap.
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