582 points by gusowen 4 days ago
After down detector went down with the rest of the internet during the Cloudflare outage today I decided to build a robust, independent tool which checks if down detector is down. Enjoy!!
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.
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 simple a question to be relevant. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we know one thing for sure - when smaller services go down the impact radius is contained. When a corrupt MBA who wants to pump short term metrics for a bonus gains power, the damage they can do is similarly contained. All risk factors are boxed in like this. With a hyperscale business, things are capable of going much more wrong for many more people, and the recursive nature of vertical+horizontal integration causes a calamity engine that can be hard to correct.
Take the financial sector in 08. Huge monoliths that had integrated every kind of financial service with every other kind of financial service. Few points of failure, every failure mode exposed to every other failure mode.
There's a reason asymmetric warfare is hard for both parties - cellular networks of small units that can act independently are extremely fault tolerant and robust against changing conditions. Giants, when they fall, do so in spectacular fashion.
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 an API that runs on their cloud!
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.
Hard disagree. A smaller provider will think twice about whether they use a Tier 1 data center versus a Tier IV data center because the cost difference is substantial and in many cases prohibitively expensive.
This. There's a fundamental logic error here. You simply don't hear about downtimes at smaller providers that often because it doesn't affect a significant portion of the internet like it does e.g. for AWS. But that doesn't mean they are more stable in general.
yeah, I'd like to see hard data on uptimes / reliability between these 2 services before declaring that big = bad and small = good.
FlyIO (and Digital Ocean) had horrible up-time when they first got started. In the last 6-12 months, FlyIO been much better. But they would go down all the time or have unexpected CI bugs/changes.
Digital Ocean accidentally hard deleted user's object stores before their IPO.
> A lot of people want the brand recognition too.
Not to mention the familiarity of the company, its services and expectations. You can hire people with experience with AWS, Azure or GCP, but the more niche you go, the higher the possibility that some people you hire might not know how to work with those systems and their nuances, which is fine they can learn as they work, but that adds to ramp up time and could lead to inadvertent mistakes happening.
I agree, though the industry does this all the time by hiring someone with a degree vs someone who built key infrastructure and has no degree, solely because they have a degree. Remember, the creator of brew couldn't get past a Google interview because they asked him to hand craft some algorithm, I probably would have not done well with those either. Does that make him or me worse developers? Doubtful. Does it mean Google missed out on hiring someone who loves his craft? Yes.
I think that is often the perception, but is usually mistaken.
Smaller providers tend to have simpler systems so it only adds to ramp up time if you hire someone who only knows AWS or whatever. Simpler also means fewer mistakes.
If you stick to a simple set of services (e.g. VPS or containers + object storage) there are very few service specific nuances.
They also have the risk factor of leaving the market entirely as well, and you having to scramble to pick up the pieces.
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...
>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.
Configuring something on premises to match the capabilities of AWS or Azure or CloudFlare is very, very difficult and involves a lot of local money and expertise that often isn’t available at any affordable price.
> 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.
AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.
You can use whatever infrastructure you want for whatever reason, but you may not have an accurate picture of the availability.
> AWS and Cloudflare don't actually experience more downtime, it's just a bigger story when they are down because so many people use them.
This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year.
That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.
>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year
That's the least useful information.
What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.
Earlier this year, a Hetzner server I manage was shutdown, and after I started it via the console, it booted to a rescue system. In the same month, it was rebooted without a reason. There was some maintenance notice but the server was not listed as impacted.
Note that I'm not saying Hetzner is bad. Just incidents happen in Europe too. The server didn't have a lot of issues like this over the years.
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/
That component is what keeps me from using Cloudflare for anything. Not because it exists, but because the way it's run is terrible for the open web: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
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, they were a really good deal years ago but have become expensive af
well they're not comparable to hetzner anymore, both in terms of features and price. only their dedibox brand could compare, as it's the classic hosting approach vs cloud.
for the hobby crowd it's a shame, for a corporation it's still cheaper than aws with the extra bonus of not having any tie to the us.
American solo developer here. Moved to Hetzner two months ago. They have servers in Oregon for west coast people. My storage box is in Germany but that is okay, it is for backups.
Hello, You can test Sweego - https://www.sweego.io/ We (I'm the CTO) are fully European Bye Pierre-Yves
nice, im looking to ditch SES, one of the last services i have running on AWS
Hyvor Relay (https://github.com/hyvor/relay) can be self-hosted. We are planning a cloud version for 2026. (I am a co-founder)
Interesting, I've added it on my Awesome Opensource Email Resources https://github.com/Mindbaz/awesome-opensource-email
https://mailpace.com is fully European based and independent
UK inherited the same gdpr from the EU, so practically it remains the same.
MailPace data is also hosted in the EU only
Same here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so many sites were down.
This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.
but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector
I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.
haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.
See, that's the joke, all of them are on cloudflare/us-west-1 so they all go down together anyway
Time for the META Down Detector - detecting which of the three is down
There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.
But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.
It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.
who is going to throw $10 at
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...
It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(
Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.
From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.
It's a centralization vs decentralisation 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 heartbeat 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.
here's a page that monitors that page: https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...
Looks like it's hosted in London?
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...
"Need" is a strong word. But I think the point is that if you expect wildly spikey traffic/don't want the site to go down if it receives a very sudden influx of requests, going static is a very good answer, much cheaper than "serverless" or over-provisioning.
I think an important caveat here is that down detector was not actually down, the cloudflare human verification component was (AFAIK). I wonder if this downdetector down detector accounts for that aspect? It was technically "not down" but still unusable.
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
}
]
};
}I'm curious if this site actually uses AI in some form or if it's just the hot TLD at the moment. There's no mention of AI on the page itself.
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
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
I randomly started vibe coding a website monitoring tool last week knowing full well about the mature competitors in this space and questioning myself along the way. Doesn't seem so crazy now.
This is the kind of recursive absurdity I come to HN for.
So, naturally, the feature request is: who watches the watchmen? We need downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com next.
I made a picture of myself taking a picture of myself taking a picture of my self in a mirror... at some point I solved my halting problem and walked away.
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.
No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.
Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha
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.
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”
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.