This afternoon, TechCrunch posted an article about chartbeatbreaking the 1,000,000 concurrent visitors mark and the story sucked me in.

One of my major inspirations for building UserPing was from some of my frustrations with chartbeat's package prices and my stubborn frustration with being forced to pay $10/month for a level of service that far surpassed my needs. I may be hugely biased, but I'm extremely happy with some of the things I've built in to UserPing like our sexy automated alerts system that will watch your traffic and send you a message when Something Is Happening!

Despite all of this, I still can't help but feel envious of the gorgeous interface that chartbeat provides. The UserPing dashboard is obviously something that only a programmer would design and when you compare our dashboard to the chartbeat dashboard it's obvious who has the more polished product.

I'm hard at work trying to make improvements to the UserPing interface to give you guys a page that doesn't make you wish you were somewhere else, but until I finish up and release some improvements we're left with something fairly ugly.

But enough about me...

Anyway, now is not the time to celebrate the wonderous potential of UserPing. Now is the time to take a step back and be seriously happy for a great group of our peers as they cross over a fairly significant threshold of scale. 1,000,000 concurrent visitors is a pretty massive number of sessions to track and I can't even begin to visualize what their infrastructure looks like.

The fact that they're able to take that massive deluge of traffic and continue to spit out excellent real-time reports and beautiful charts is a testament to the awesome people working over there.

From the bottom of my heart, I am extremely happy for the chartbeat folks and wish them well through 2,000,000 concurrent visitors. You guys are in a completely different league and you stand out above the rest of us hacks in every aspect. Bravo!

And They're Classy Too!

I left a comment on the TechCrunch article about why I felt compelled to build UserPing to offer free service for other struggling startups and to my surprise, I got a very nice personal reply from the chartbeat GM, Tony Haile.

He even said that my cartoon made him smile!

Talk about being a class act. This guy invented being classy.

In typical Eric Harrison fashion, I just had to make a witty reply and ask him to give me his charting libraries. He hasn't responded yet, so I'm going to assume he's off zipping up all the files so that he can email them to me.

Be on the lookout for pretty chart improvements in the near future... ;)