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Comment by ai4mathlogicrsn | Hacker News Reader

Claude.ai is down… Powered by Atlassian StatusPage. SaaS is dead, but even Anthropic needs SaaS!

The thing about status pages is they have to be up when you're down, and (if your service is non trivial) they have to be able to handle a traffic profile that basically looks like DDOS. So, you're paying for the hosting infra more than the software.

Yeh, I've tackled this problem a few times, and just like back-ups you at some point need something external, because if you're down, you don't want your status page to go down too. This means you need to make sure to sandbox it pretty hard if rolling your own, ideally on a separate cloud behind a different CDN etc...

This is fundamentally the argument against all "SaaS is dead due to AI" claims.

Replicating the basic functionality for most SaaS is trivial, it's the "everything else" part that you're actually paying for.

>This is fundamentally the argument against all "SaaS is dead due to AI" claims.

The steelman version of "SaaS is dead due to AI" isn't that SaaS companies will disappear, it's that competition will greatly intensify, to the extent that it becomes a commodity business with thin margins, rather than the money printer it is today.

Nah even the trivial part is too much for most businesses to do themselves.

Most companies aren’t going to opt for a bespoke solution to things if something tried and true already exists. Maybe the really small simple applications will be affected, but the ones with hundreds of features and years of experience will be fine.

> This is fundamentally the argument against all "SaaS is dead due to AI" claims.

True, All as in everything. I think Anthropic is extremely silly for thinking that and maybe even a bit delusional.

But to take the devil sides here, maybe some might be a better accurate term as to be honest, Status pages are a mission critical. Imagine this page landed 404 and the panic then vs now. Also I can be wrong, I usually am but status page innovation is more devops oriented than software itself. Basically how do you keep the status page website as having the best status time of itself (imagine it goes down) and its needed 24x7 as outage can happen anytime.

I do feel like status pages are more the exception than the norm in how mission critical they can be, again I can be wrong. Also you can self host status page easily yourself if you wish (UptimeKuma is awesome!) on a 7$/yr vps and there are so many free options available out there and its very much a competitive space to be in and basically no lock-in for the most part.

when you are funded by investment money, you don't need to care much about these things.

Chrome tells me that page is almost 4MB? I feel like you could better handle loads against a nicely formatted text file.

Hosting a static page updated once per minute or so is hardly rocket science.

SaaS is dead because large chunks of the industry can't do work or understand their codebase without depending on a proprietary AI model from a single provider.

And you thought GitHub or us-east-1 outages were bad.

GitHub outages are most likely entirely unrelated to anything AI, and 100% caused by their move from on-prem hosting to Azure.

They have a very unusual workload in that they need to write to disk a lot more than what is typical, making them harder to host for a generic cloud provider. And also Azure sucks so bad it's almost impressive GitHub has any uptime at all!

Agree with your statement overall but to be honest, status pages are the only SaaS which might make sense. For example, some hosting providers themselves who sell VPS etc. won't run their own website in their VPS and I asked one of the providers why and they mentioned because if they do and the servers go down, their website would 404 too, so they host on other infra in a sense for better redundancy.

Isn't there a thought here that you don't host your status page on your infra itself, and if for example they are using hetzner etc. and hosting their own vibe coded one, then they might need an engineer so might as well have Saas whose whole job is this.

I could've maybe recommended one of those status software[0] which actually runs on github actions but github themselves seem to have some downtime :p

[0]: https://github.com/upptime/upptime (for anyone interested)

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