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 wrong.
A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
That's an incredibly bad take lol.
There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.
I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.
> I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
I don't think they'd care. Companies only care about one thing: stock price. Everything rolls up into that. If AWS got hacked and said company was affected by it, it wouldn't be a big deal because they'd be one of many and they'd be lost in the crowd. Any hit to their stock/profits would be minimal and easily forgotten about.
Now, if they were on prem or hosted with Bob's Cloud and got hacked? Different story altogether.
It does mean that you get fewer services, you have to do more sysadmin internally or use other providers for those which a lot of people are very reluctant to do.
When forced to use AWS I only use the extra features I am specifically told to or that are already in use in order to make the system less tied to AWS and easier for me to manage (I am not an AWS specialist so its easier for me to just run stuff like I would on any server or VPS). I particularly dislike RDS (of things I have used). I like Lightsail because its reasonably priced and very like just getting a VPS.
S3 is something of an exception, but it does not tie you down (everyone provides block storage now, and you can use S3 even if everything else is somewhere else) for me if storing lots of large files that are not accessed very much (so egress fees are low).
They've recently introduced bunny.net Shield to add a security layer. I've not made use of it yet so I don't know what the coverage is like or how effective it is: https://bunny.net/shield/
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
I have similar project like this: https://hostbeat.info/
More like t uptime robot and sure, I was really surprised yesterday how many alerts I have got and how many notifications were sent yesterday for this system users. Good work anyway
It's a centralization vs décentralisation vs distributed system question.
Since down detectors serve to detect failures of centralized (and decentralized systems) the idea would be to at least get that right: a distributed system to detect outages.
You basically run detectors that hearthbeat each others. Just a few suffice.
Once you start to see clusters of detectors go silent, you can assume things are falling apart, which is fine so long as a few remain.
Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.
Thank you for your service! Now, for an even bigger challenge: since it seems the increased demand for the Cloudflare status page brought down Amazon CloudFront for a bit as well, build a new CDN capable of handling that load as well...
But CDNs are made for static content so your comment means I can't run a dynamic website unless I have unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity.
I feel like the classic East Dakota reply would be that cloud flare CDN does not host your data and merely proxies it (bonus points if he uses the words "mere conduit" in his reply and therefore cloud flare can't be held responsible yada yada).
I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)
As the Web becomes more and more entangled, I don't know if there is any guarantee of what is really independent. We should make a diagram of this. Hopefully no cyclic dependencies there yet.
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.
How does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
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 wrong.
A lot of people want the brand recognition too. Its also become the standard way of doing things and is part of the business culture. I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
I think cloudflare has billions worth of incentives to be reliable however they can slip up, it happens and that's why centralization is bad.
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.
That's an incredibly bad take lol.
There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the majority of the time companies over-use the cloud. On Prem is GOOD. It's cheaper, arguably more secure if you configure it right (a challenge, I know, but hear me out) and gives you data sovereignty.
I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
Any Data you have on the cloud is no longer your data. Not really. It's Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whoevers.
> I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
I don't think they'd care. Companies only care about one thing: stock price. Everything rolls up into that. If AWS got hacked and said company was affected by it, it wouldn't be a big deal because they'd be one of many and they'd be lost in the crowd. Any hit to their stock/profits would be minimal and easily forgotten about.
Now, if they were on prem or hosted with Bob's Cloud and got hacked? Different story altogether.
> Less complexity to go wrong.
This sounds like a good thing.
It is, in itself.
It does mean that you get fewer services, you have to do more sysadmin internally or use other providers for those which a lot of people are very reluctant to do.
I bet most people don't even need the extra features.
When forced to use AWS I only use the extra features I am specifically told to or that are already in use in order to make the system less tied to AWS and easier for me to manage (I am not an AWS specialist so its easier for me to just run stuff like I would on any server or VPS). I particularly dislike RDS (of things I have used). I like Lightsail because its reasonably priced and very like just getting a VPS.
S3 is something of an exception, but it does not tie you down (everyone provides block storage now, and you can use S3 even if everything else is somewhere else) for me if storing lots of large files that are not accessed very much (so egress fees are low).
Big fan of bunny.net as CDN, however Cloudflare is my "smart" filter for all kind of attacks, AI scrapers, malicious traffic, etc.
Am I missing something or is bunny.net not actually a replacement for that?
They've recently introduced bunny.net Shield to add a security layer. I've not made use of it yet so I don't know what the coverage is like or how effective it is: https://bunny.net/shield/
I've done something similar, it's worth noting Scaleway in the same space, for people looking for an AWS replacement more like managed services (equivalents to fargate/lambda/sqs/s3/etc) instead of just bare instance hosting.
+1 for Scaleway. I also use Hetzner for most of my compute. But some stuff just really profits from using managed services. I‘ve used Scaleway‘s Serverless compute offers and managed DBs an been quite happy with them.
-1 for Scaleway, they were a really good deal years ago but have become expensive af
> Bunny.net
Ah yes, the place for RabbitMQ endpoints.
This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.
but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector
There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.
https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo
See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1 so they all go down together anyway
pervs.
I have similar project like this: https://hostbeat.info/ More like t uptime robot and sure, I was really surprised yesterday how many alerts I have got and how many notifications were sent yesterday for this system users. Good work anyway
Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1
But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.
It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....
It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(
It says down now correctly :D
who is going to throw $10 at
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...
Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?
4xDowndetector lol
It was worth the laugh, thanks!
It's a centralization vs décentralisation vs distributed system question.
Since down detectors serve to detect failures of centralized (and decentralized systems) the idea would be to at least get that right: a distributed system to detect outages.
You basically run detectors that hearthbeat each others. Just a few suffice.
Once you start to see clusters of detectors go silent, you can assume things are falling apart, which is fine so long as a few remain.
Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.
Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.
here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...
Looks like it's hosted in London?
Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.
From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph
Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.
Thank you for your service! Now, for an even bigger challenge: since it seems the increased demand for the Cloudflare status page brought down Amazon CloudFront for a bit as well, build a new CDN capable of handling that load as well...
Do you need a CDN for a static html, no images? I would guess no, even if you.are being bombarded with requests
I would guess yes, unless you have a server with unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity to every other AS...
But CDNs are made for static content so your comment means I can't run a dynamic website unless I have unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity.
Semi-related: Datadog recently created https://updog.ai
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670
Is it hosted on Cloudflare?
I feel like the classic East Dakota reply would be that cloud flare CDN does not host your data and merely proxies it (bonus points if he uses the words "mere conduit" in his reply and therefore cloud flare can't be held responsible yada yada).
Jokes aside, as far as I can tell, https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare CDN/Proxy
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is NOT using Cloudflare SSL
However, selesti reports it uses cloudflare DNS?
https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=https://downdetect...
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is using Cloudflare DNS!
Checked 8 global locations, found DNS entries for Cloudflare in 3
Found in: England, Russia, USA
Not found in: China, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Netherlands
That won’t be an issue though - as we all know, DNS is rarely related to cloud failures
of course, adding to the joke
Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me
and i still can't find any feathers
Niiice! Thank you for the laugh.
I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)
As the Web becomes more and more entangled, I don't know if there is any guarantee of what is really independent. We should make a diagram of this. Hopefully no cyclic dependencies there yet.
Nice! Who doesn’t like a good recursion? Fingers crossed that the down detector for down detector won’t be down, when down detector might be down
Use the original down detector to monitor the down detector for down detector for down detector. Complete the circle!
Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for good measure.
Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.
What are you, an LLM? You point the first one at the second one and create a loop instead of an infinite "one more" chain
quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?
isisitdowndown.com is still free
Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D
But who is going to watch him?!
his cat. at least when he's on toilet
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”
Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s