Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdwaller | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone educate me why companies choose to buy secondary domains for their status pages? I find it confusing and would trust `status.company.tld` immediately rather than having to think about it and verify - which you can’t really do when the issue comes up.

View on HN

Allows for completely separate stacks running the status page, including DNS and registrar. In theory, you could run your status page using zero infrastructure common with your main domain.

That makes sense. Thank you!

Someone have commented that (for brevity and to ensure anonymity, the wording have been changed):

  Your answer makes no sense, DNS are decentralised!

Someone have forgotten Facebook's outage.

It wasn't DNS in principle that caused the outage.

If I recall correctly, it was their DNS servers that did that in a convoluted kind of way but not because of DNS as such. Due to some connection error or another the servers that also run DNS ordered the routers to withdraw the BGP routes to all Facebook properties which in turn killed access to said DNS servers.

You're technically correct, but someone making that DNS is decentralised is plain wrong (it's far from it).

You would want to host the status page on completely independent infra, such that if your service goes down, it doesn't take down the status page as well. This includes DNS, hence the separate domain.

For example, with Facebook's recent outage, because they hosted their status page on the same DNS server as their regular service, they weren't able to communicate the outage on their status page.

It's a common complaint that "even their status page isn't up" -- this is often because DNS issues take out both the site and their status page

I assumed it was because of you're having issues with your primary domain (bad DNS records, DNS provider outage, etc) then you've got a separate domain with a separate provider, that hopefully has a more separated failure domain

The obvious answer to me is complete isolation, especially if the issue is related to DNS.

If you’re having major network problems, there’s a good chance your DNS server will go down too, which would more than likely take down your subdomain as well.

Having it on the same domain could be a single point of failure in the case that their DNS nameservers go down. If their status page is on the same domain and they have bad DNS issues, it would bring down their status page as well.

a good status page will be completely separate from the thing it's statusing, otherwise it goes down too.

Nobody's figured out that you can redirect a DNS record to an external host yet

Ask facebook ...

Depends on your DNS hosting. FB found out a bit ago what happens when everything is hosted on the same infra.

Everyone hireable for ops not only knows what you meant to say, not what you said, but that they’re also solving for completely different problems than you’ve inferred. It’s not about who hosts the target.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com