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Comment by bitbasher | Hacker News Reader

First and foremost, I love a good side hustle.

With that being said, I find these kinds notifications to provide more false positives than correctly detecting downtime. That ends up costing more time checking/double checking.

On the other hand, if you are running a service with no users and you have downtime... did you really have downtime?

If you run a service and you have downtime and no one reports it, did you have downtime?

I don't even check for my services. If something goes down, I'll find out via email from one or more of my customers. It happens very rarely.

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

You bring up a good point. I think it to be less of a problem for more established companies that don't face unexpected outages too often. When we were starting out with our mobile app however this wasn't the case, and each outage meant downloads lost which were critical for getting early feedback. I see it as a bigger pain point for early founders/small teams whose server could see a lot of volatility.

So far we haven't encountered any false positives (been using it for around 6 months) but perhaps with the wrong endpoint that could be a problem. I'll keep an eye out for that.

> I find these kinds notifications to provide more false positives than correctly detecting downtime

There are services like Textbelt that leave the trigger mechanisms all up to you and your local tools:

https://textbelt.com/

Oof! I'd rather be half way through fixing the problem while the customer first discovers it.

Unless you have 1 customer who lives in the same time zone or something.

I'd understand not wanring to be being woken up from a page for a small operation though.

In my experience, most customers are amazed you even respond to their email. If you fix a bug or issue within 24 hours they are amazed.

Very true - our goal is to help companies keep their customers amazed. Especially when starting out with early adopters. Though perhaps not something that can scale as easily.

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