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I made a down detector for down detector(downdetectorsdowndetector.com)
113 points by gusowen 10 hours ago | 28 comments
spyridonas 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

graemep 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

buildfocus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

moooo99 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

+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.

moffkalast 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Bunny.net

Ah yes, the place for RabbitMQ endpoints.

jesperwe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1

4ndrewl 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.

It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.

thinkingemote 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/

wltr 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

It was worth the laugh, thanks!

Nevermark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.

rozenmd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...

Looks like it's hosted in London?

bell-cot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

ZeroConcerns 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...

carstenhag 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you need a CDN for a static html, no images? I would guess no, even if you.are being bombarded with requests

ZeroConcerns 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

I would guess yes, unless you have a server with unlimited file descriptors and flawless connectivity to every other AS...

alentred 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Niiice! Thank you for the laugh.

I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)

As the Web app layer 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.

BrenBarn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sup dawg, I heard you like down detectors.

ricq 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it hosted on Cloudflare?

mcny 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

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

xp84 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

That won’t be an issue though - as we all know, DNS is rarely related to cloud failures

p_v_doom 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?

goopypoop 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

and i still can't find any feathers

ulf-77723 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

kijin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Use the original down detector to monitor the down detector for down detector for down detector. Complete the circle!

theturtlemoves an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

isisitdowndown.com is still free

Brajeshwar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”

cweagans 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D

gblargg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s