About SysOSX

Who runs it

SysOSX is run by John, a former Microsoft engineer with 20 years of experience across cloud platforms, infrastructure and systems operations. The guides on this site — Windows Server and RDS, Linux administration, Azure, TLS, DNS and email — are written from that experience: problems met in production, traced properly, and explained with the steps that actually fixed them. You can browse everything he has published on the author archive.

What you will find here

Tools. Twenty-plus free tools, in two kinds. Server-backed checks — a website health check, TLS grader, port scanner, blacklist checker, DNS propagation check and more — run from our own servers against the real internet, because that is the only way to get a truthful answer. Browser-based tools — calculators, parsers and generators — run entirely on your machine; your files never leave it.

LLM pricing. The LLM pricing leaderboard tracks what the major model providers actually charge, and every price is re-verified against the provider's official page on a weekly cycle. Each row shows its source and the date it was last verified — prices we could not confirm are badged, never hidden.

The blog. The blog archive holds years of operational writing at its original addresses, and new guides are added alongside every tool we ship — a tool and the article that explains the problem behind it, linked both ways.

How the checks work

When you run a server-backed check, our checker connects to the target the way a visitor, a mail server or a monitoring probe would — resolving DNS with the answers pinned, negotiating TLS version by version, walking redirect chains — and reports what it actually observed, including the parts that failed. A check is a snapshot of one moment, labelled with its time; results are cached briefly so repeat checks are fast and target servers are not hammered. Where a measurement cannot be made honestly — a protocol a library cannot speak, a list that does not answer — the report says so instead of inventing a verdict.

Monitoring, when a snapshot is not enough

SysOSX is the free, one-off side of a simple idea: most painful outages are cheap to detect early. For continuous watching — certificate and domain expiry, uptime, keyword and port checks with alerts — the same operator runs myeventwatch, a separate monitoring service. The tools here work fully without it; where a report offers a monitoring link, it is an offer, not a toll gate.

Contact

Corrections, tool ideas and pricing updates are welcome — see the contact page for how to reach us. The site's privacy policy and terms of use are short and written in plain language.