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Comment by fookyong | Hacker News Reader

If you're just doing a GET request then this doesn't solve the problem.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you're trying to solve the problem of reliably displaying uptime status to answer the "huh it's down for me, is it down for you?" question that users sometimes have.

Just sending a GET doesn't really solve this, as it will only give you the status of the server from the point of view of that node.

Anyway, it depends what your intended use-case is.

If it's for publicly displaying uptime and therefore taking the reputation of the client company into your own hands, I would make sure that the method of reporting is as accurate as possible. I don't even think multiple nodes is the answer. You basically have to have a daemon installed on the client server.

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Yep, you're right that a single GET request has some problems. We don't right now (because we wanted to get feedback ASAP), but we will definitely be checking from multiple nodes (running on multiple different providers) by the time we're charging people money so that we're as sure as we can be that the problem isn't us.

Getting an API together (to enable a server daemon) is also very high on our priority list. (Although the disadvantage with that is that then you're not actually checking to see if the site's up: you're checking whether the server's alive, and that doesn't necessarily mean the site is up.) We do recognize we're dealing with something tricky and we want to get it right. Thanks for the feedback.

no probs.

I guess to make my point more relevant in a business sense, I recognise the problem being solved here. In fact it's not just users who have the "is it down?" question, it's non-technical coworkers in a large organisation too. I'm the web director at a medium-sized company and I've had my fair share of "is it down?" phone calls at inconvenient times in the night :)

However, for me to put my faith in a 3rd party service where I could refer coworkers or users to confirm the uptime instead of contacting me directly, and - more importantly - for my to get my wallet out and pay for it, I would need to know first that the data is as accurate as it can be.

Perhaps that's your freemium model right there:

Free - a simple uptime page

Paid - a more detailed uptime page with multiple nodes, OS service status via API, latency from various locations, response times over the last hour, etc.

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