Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

downdetectorsdowndetector.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 184 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#151

Post by smaudet »

KK7NIL wrote: post #142
pksebben wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is this weird thing that happens with hyperscale - the combination of highly central decision-making, extreme interconnection / interdependence of parts, and the attractiveness of lots of money all conspire to create a system pulled by unstable attractors to a fracturing point (slowed / mitigated at least a little by the inertia of such a large ship). Are smaller scale services more reliable? I think that's too…

Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug? If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions. But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on…

> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature

It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away).

The real problem is not having a fail-over provider. Modern software is so abstracted (tens, hundreds, even thousands of layers), and yet we still make the mistake of depending on one, two layers to make things "go".

When your one small provider goes down, no problem, switch over to your other provider. Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#153

Post by NetMageSCW »

smaudet wrote: post #151
KK7NIL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug? If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions. But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on…

> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away). The real problem is not having a fail-over provider. Modern software is so abstracted (tens, hundreds, even thousands of layers), and yet we still make the mistake of depending on one, two layers to make things "go". When your one small provider goes do…

That just leads to an upstream single point of failure.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#154

Post by tonymet »

the internet can be divided up into factions like Divergent. AWSubbies (orange), Azure-ants (blue), CloudFlaricons (black) & the Rogues (jester colors, like Google). A proper down detector would identify platform outages based on the number of faction members who are down.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#156

Post by runjake »

graemep wrote: post #30
spyridonas wrote: post #13

As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year. Cloudflare > Bunny.net AWS > Hetzner Business email > Infomaniak Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.

Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between). Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go…

> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.

I disagree because conversely, outages for larger providers cause millions or maybe even billions of dollars in losses for its customers. They might be more "stuck" in their current providers' proprietary schemes, but these kinds of losses will cause them to move away, or at least diversify cloud providers. In turn, this will cause income losses to the cloud provider.

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#157

Post by codexon »

graemep wrote: post #30
spyridonas wrote: post #13

As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year. Cloudflare > Bunny.net AWS > Hetzner Business email > Infomaniak Not a single client site has experienced downtime, and it feels great to finally decouple from U.S. services.

Those are all much smaller. Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not. In a corporate settings management will say "this would not have happened if you had gone with AWS". its the current version of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (we had MS and others in between). Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go…

I've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.

First I used an ex101 with an i9-13900. Within a week it just froze. It could not be reset remotely. Nothing in kern.log. Support offered no solution but a hard reboot. No mention of what might be wrong other than user error.

A few months later, one of the drives just disconnects from raid by itself. It took support 1 hour to respond and they said they found no issue so it must be my fault.

Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.

It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#158

Post by omoikane »

Retr0id wrote: post #74

How does it detect up-ness? Downdetector was indeed down during the cf outage, but I think the index page was still returning 200 (although I didn't check). Running a headless browser to take a screenshot to check would probably get you blocked by cf...

It just fakes it as far as I can tell.

script.js calls `fetchStatus()`, which calls `generateMockStatus()` to get the statuses, which just makes up random response times:

    // ---- generate deterministic mock data for the current 3-min window ----

    function generateMockStatus() {
      const bucket = getCurrentBucket();
      const rng = createRng(bucket);

      // "Virtual now" = middle of this 3-minute bucket
      const virtualNowMs = bucket * BUCKET_MS + BUCKET_MS / 2;

      // Checked a few minutes ago (2–5 min, plus random seconds)
      const minutesOffset = randomInt(rng, 2, 5);
      const secondsOffset = randomInt(rng, 0, 59);
      const checkedAtMs =
        virtualNowMs - minutesOffset * 60_000 - secondsOffset * 1000;
      const checkedAtDate = new Date(checkedAtMs);

      return {
        checkedAt: checkedAtDate.toISOString(),
        target: "https://downdetector.com/",
        regions: [
          {
            name: "London, UK",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 250, 550),
            error: null
          },
          {
            name: "Auckland, NZ",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 300, 650),
            error: null
          },
          {
            name: "New York, US",
            status: "up",
            httpStatus: 200,
            responseTimeMs: randomInt(rng, 380, 800),
            error: null
          }
        ]
      };
    }

Re: Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector

#159

Post by KK7NIL »

smaudet wrote: post #151
KK7NIL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature, not a bug? If AWS goes down, no one will blame you for your web store being down as pretty much every other online service will be seeing major disruptions. But when your super small provider goes down, it's now your problem and you better have some answers ready for your manager. And you'll still be affected by the AWS outage anyways as you probably rely on…

> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away). The real problem is not having a fail-over provider. Modern software is so abstracted (tens, hundreds, even thousands of layers), and yet we still make the mistake of depending on one, two layers to make things "go". When your one small provider goes do…

Very few online services are so essential that they require a fail-over plan for an AWS outage, so this is just plain over-engineering.

> Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...

Let's not stroke our egos too much here, mkay?

Post reply on HN