# Numbers for the RSS Monitoring Service
Tuesday, 5. March 2024


Last week I published a
[free tool to monitor the expiration of TLS certificates](https://raphting.dev/posts/monitor-rss/).

The UX is clunky. Users have to hand-type the URL pattern. There are no queries for customization.
And still, more than 500 domains were added over the course of a few days. About half of them are monitored frequently
via RSS.

![monitored domains](https://raphting.dev/img/domain-monitor.webp)

I got a lot of constructive feedback and friendly comments on Hacker News and Lobsters.
This showed me again what a great community we have in software development.

On a side note, I think the well known monitoring solutions are often too big for what self-hosters need.
I imagine that's why the RSS monitoring solution is so appealing to many. It solves a problem that self-hosters have
without requiring the big monitoring and alerting solutions.
There's probably much to explore in the space of monitoring, alerting and self-hosting.


By Raphael Sprenger