As a European solo developer, I’ve switched entirely to European alternatives for all my infrastructure since the beginning of the year.<p>Cloudflare > Bunny.net<p>AWS > Hetzner<p>Business email > Infomaniak<p>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).<p>Hetzner provides a much simpler set of services than AWS. Less complexity to go wrong.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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!
> Have you considered that a widespread outage is a feature<p>It's a "feature" right up there with planned obsolescence and garbage culture (the culture of throw-away).<p>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".<p>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...
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.<p>> Then laugh at the people who are experiencing AWS downtime...<p>Let's not stroke our egos too much here, mkay?
That just leads to an upstream single point of failure.
Depends on your customers understanding that. We had a gym with 'smart' pilates machines that went down. Hard to explain to them the cloud is involved
> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.<p>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.
> A lot of people want the brand recognition too.<p>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.
This could also be an anti-pattern for hiring - getting people with Amazing Web Service (tm) certification and missing out on candidates with a solid understanding of the foundational principles these services are built on
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.<p>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.<p>If you stick to a simple set of services (e.g. VPS or containers + object storage) there are very few service specific nuances.
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've actually tried hetzner on and off with 1 server for the past 2 years and keep running into downtime every few months.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Then I changed to a ryzen based server and it also mysteriously had problems like this. Again the support blamed the user.<p>It was only after I cancelled the server and several months later that I see this so I know it isn't just me.<p><a href="https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-information/mainboard-replacement-for-several-dedicated-servers/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...</a>
>I have sometimes been told its unprofessional or looks bad to run things yourself instead of using a managed service.<p>That's an incredibly bad take lol.<p>There are times where "The Cloud" makes sense, sure. But in my experience the <i>majority</i> 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.<p>I don't quite think companies realize <i>how bad</i> it would be if EG AWS was hacked.<p>Any Data you have on the cloud is <i>no longer your data</i>. 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.<p>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.<p>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.
>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.<p>A large number of cloud customers dont need the complexity that the cloud can offer. Like, yes, its hard to 1:1 feature replicate the cloud. But so many people just have some VMs and some routes.
And they would need a team to support the hypervisor. Znd its backup. And its performance. And, and, and.<p>This is fine if you are big. Anything smaller and it is a big problem.<p>This is also why they do not manage their plumbing and do not run z restaurant in house. Some things are better left to companies that do it at scale
> Less complexity to go wrong.<p>This sounds like a good thing.
<i>> Smaller providers have a much stronger incentive to be reliable, as they will lose customers if they are not.</i><p>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.
And they sell when get big but can't afford to be.
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.<p>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.<p>This may be true over a long enough timeframe, but GP stated that their clients had experienced <i>no</i> downtime since switching at the start of the year.<p>That is clearly better than both AWS and Cloudflare during that time.
My clients (extremely large) AWS based infrastructure experienced no downtime this year.
So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.<p>I don't use cloud flare for anything, so no comment there.
> So, if it's based on some random person's clients, it's not clearly better at all.<p>Valid. I should have made it clear that I meant "clearly better from GP's perspective."
>GP stated that their clients had experienced no downtime since switching at the start of the year<p>That's the least useful information.<p>What matters for his service availability is what he should expect going forward. What matters for reviewing his decision making process is <i>what he should have expected at the time of choosing service providers.</i>
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.<p>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.
Big fan of bunny.net as CDN, however Cloudflare is my "smart" filter for all kind of attacks, AI scrapers, malicious traffic, etc.<p>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: <a href="https://bunny.net/shield/" rel="nofollow">https://bunny.net/shield/</a>
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: <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_niche_browsers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...</a>
How does Infomaniak compare to Proton? I see they have more office productivity products, but regarding mail and drive?
As an American solo developer, I am close to doing the same. These mega-corps are out of control.
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.
We are also looking to migrate off Cloudflare. I thought Bunny.net was mostly a pure CDN, not a reverse proxy like Cloudflare. Am I wrong? One of the most important things for us would be DDoS protection.
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.
Do you have anything for device management? Like managing local admin accounts on Linux, Macintosh and Windows? I'm afraid we'll have to use InTune.
Are you using a US-based transactional email service like Twilio? Curious about EU-based alternatives.
Hello,
You can test Sweego - <a href="https://www.sweego.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sweego.io/</a>
We (I'm the CTO) are fully European
Bye
Pierre-Yves
Hyvor Relay (<a href="https://github.com/hyvor/relay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hyvor/relay</a>) can be self-hosted. We are planning a cloud version for 2026. (I am a co-founder)
<a href="https://mailpace.com" rel="nofollow">https://mailpace.com</a> is fully European based and independent
They are based in the UK. That is technically Europe, but I believe for privacy regulations it isn't the same as a EU-country, but I could be very wrong. Would love to be educated on this by someone.
There are self hostable alts to twillio
Same here! I also got a nice peak in my traffic, because so many sites were down.
This is worth its own post.
I feel like a year is too short a time frame to measure reliability.
Aren't costs higher though?
> Bunny.net<p>Ah yes, <i>the</i> place for RabbitMQ endpoints.
Wow looks like you don't have one of the most renowned benefits of capitalism: over-reliance on corporatist infrastructure.
Yeah we had a good laugh when Downdetector was down during the Cloudflare outage yesterday. So this is appropriate. +1
This is GOLD Jerry, Gold.<p>but who detects the down detector detecting the down detector detecting the down detector
You're on that site right now!
<a href="https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/downdetectorsdowndetector.com.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/downdetectorsdowndetector.c...</a>
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.
> Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?<p>Arbites.
Can down detector not detect whether down detector detector is down or not?<p>Maybe distributed down detection?<p>I know there are people here perfectly capable of running with that idea and we might just see a distributed down detector announced on HN :)
<a href="http://factoryfactoryfactory.net/" rel="nofollow">http://factoryfactoryfactory.net/</a>
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
Or "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
I think the original down detectors do
It's detectors all the way down.
There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo</a>
Three down detectors walk into a bar. The bartender asks them if they're all up. The first says "I don't know". The second says "I don't know". The third says "Yes".
But we need another one to detect whether yours is still up.<p>It's downdetectorsdown all the way down.
<a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/</a>
<a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector....</a>
who is going to throw $10 at<p><a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectors...</a>
Had to check, but that is actually beyond what DNS allows. Labels (the part between dots) are limited to 63 characters. We could sneakily drop an s somewhere in there and then it would fit.<p><a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035" rel="nofollow">https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035</a><p>Also I think I triggered a nice error log in domaintools just now. <a href="https://whois.domaintools.com/downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com" rel="nofollow">https://whois.domaintools.com/downdetectorsdowndetectorsdown...</a>
I don't know if I'm the only one, but I keep coming back to check. :-)
Could we monitor all of these with downdetector?
It says all systems operational yet Los Angeles, USA is down. :(
4xDowndetector lol
It was worth the laugh, thanks!
Downdetection can be thought of as a directed graph, or digraph*.<p>From there, the "who's watching who?" can become mathematically interesting.<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_Graph</a>
Given enough of them, some fraction will always be down. It would be helpful if we had a site that could track that ratio.
It's a centralization vs decentralisation vs distributed system question.<p>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.<p>You basically run detectors that heartbeat each others. Just a few suffice.<p>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.<p>Self healing also helps to make the web of nodes resilient to inevitable infrastructure failures.
It's down detectors all the way down
here's a page that monitors <i>that</i> page: <a href="https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD1Oi-61ia_Y90gSkd&url=https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://onlineornot.com/website-down-checker?requestId=jCfaD...</a><p>Looks like it's hosted in London?
We could create a linked list of these and just refer to the N’th one as N-down detector.
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 <i>that</i> load as well...
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.
How does it detect up-ness?<p>Downdetector was indeed down during the cf outage, but I think the index page was still returning 200 (although I didn't check).<p>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.<p>script.js calls `fetchStatus()`, which calls `generateMockStatus()` to get the statuses, which just makes up random response times:<p><pre><code> // ---- 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
}
]
};
}</code></pre>
Semi-related: Datadog recently created <a href="https://updog.ai" rel="nofollow">https://updog.ai</a>
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.
Obligatory: <a href="https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ihlN5nf1qew</a>
I have similar project like this: <a href="https://hostbeat.info/" rel="nofollow">https://hostbeat.info/</a>
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
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).<p>Jokes aside, as far as I can tell,
<a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/</a> is NOT using Cloudflare CDN/Proxy<p><a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/</a> is NOT using Cloudflare SSL<p>However, selesti reports it uses cloudflare DNS?<p><a href="https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://checkforcloudflare.selesti.com/?q=https://downdetect...</a><p><a href="https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/</a> is using Cloudflare DNS!<p>Checked 8 global locations, found DNS entries for Cloudflare in 3<p>Found in: England, Russia, USA<p>Not found in: China, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Netherlands
of course, adding to the joke
Duplicate: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976670</a>
Slippery slope- just matter of time before someone makes a downdetector for the downdetector for downdetector. Ad nauseum.
and i still can't find any feathers
I randomly started <i>vibe coding</i> 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.
Make sure to host it at us-east-1 and proxy by cloudflare for good measure.
It's stuff like this that makes me still love the Internet.
This is the kind of recursive absurdity I come to HN for.<p>So, naturally, the feature request is: who watches the watchmen? We need downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com next.
<a href="https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector" rel="nofollow">https://downdetector.com/status/downdetector</a> :)
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.
If my checks are correct, this site uses Cloudflare for DNS and AWS for hosting.<p>So if any of the things you want to know is down is down, chances are this site will be too ;)
I had this same idea when I got the "Unblock challenges.cloudflare.com" error while trying to access downdetector, lol!<p>It looks really nice, good job!
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
there is also <a href="https://isdowndetectordown.com/" rel="nofollow">https://isdowndetectordown.com/</a>
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.
Damn, I'll have to build a local down detector for your down detector now.
Things might soon get bad enough that we will start calling them "up detectors."
No love for Railway? They're running their own metal and are a fantastic team.
isisitdowndown.com is still free
Niiice! Thank you for the laugh.<p>I wonder though where is it hosted? Digital Ocean? :)<p>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.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
Next, let's do a fact checker for fact checkers, haha
How long before we can do REST over downdetectors?
quid custodiet ipso custodes, amirite?
Ah, now we know that the answer to "who watches the watchers?" is "@gusowen". :D
I know this is a shitpost but someone has to say it:<p>Yo dawg I hear you like downdetector so...
Now if you make one for isup.me, you could call it isisupup.me
“Well, who’s gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?”
absolute fucking legend
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Would it be a good idea to have a second instance of this watching the first one? /s