Ask HN: How do you make sure your servers are up as a single founder?

I'm running a small business on AWS as a solo founder. It's just me. Yesterday I had a service interruption while I was in the London subway. Luckily, I was able to sign in to the AWS console and resolve the issue.

But it does (again) raise the question I'd rather not think about. What if something happens to me and there's another outage that I can't fix?

So - how do you make sure that your servers are up as a one person founder? Can I pay someone to monitor my AWS deploy and make sure it's healthy?

I use uptime robot http://uptimerobot.com for monitoring, they have a free plan or paid if you want faster checks.

If it's truly critical to have no down time then you probably need to build that resilience in to your architecture.

Yes there are plenty of start-ups doing this. You can also use AWS's build-in functionality to achieve this. You can write a Lambda function which checks your server status. Even better which calls your end-point for health check if you want more detailed monitoring

I know the situation. I haven't got to the production stage yet but I totally get it. Beside using Kubernetes, Nomad or some other scheduler, you will always have to invest your own time to resolve issues manually. You could have triggers that would invoke ansible playbooks if you don't want to handle any of the aforementioned but in the end the type of business simply requires maintenance - there is no way around that. A real human being has to be keeping an eye on the entire architecture and make sure it is running as it is supposed to.

Other people are suggesting alternative platforms when you could simply have an AWS autoscaling group. If a server goes down it simply relaunches a saved image.