

Ask HN: Would/do you pay for an uptime service? - smallegan

I'm working on an idea for an improved uptime system that only charges you when your site goes down. Is this something that you'd be interested in paying for? It would be tied to your paypal account and if your site went down and was validated to have gone down by 2 or more of our servers on different networks you would be charged a fairly small amount (say a $1).<p>Would you pay for this, if not, why?<p>Thanks in advance!
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callmeed
Please clarify ... are you just _monitoring_ uptime? Or, are you actually
fixing things when they go down?

All my major providers (Rackspace, SoftLayer and EngineYard) provide good
monitoring and 2 of them (RS and EY) usually fix things before I even have a
chance to take a look.

With SoftLayer and some of my Linode VPSs, I'd be willing to pay for
monitoring+resolution. I travel a lot so it would be cool if I got a text
message like "Server 3 is not responding to HTTP requests. Reply with Y if
you'd like us to investigate." ... that way I have the option of looking
myself or having you look.

That's probably more service work than you want to do, but I think there's a
need for "managed" work like that with so many cloud/VPS providers around.

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smallegan
My idea actually covers 2 major concerns that I've had in the past.

1) Keeping the "Rackspaces" of the world in check (I've had intermittent
outages with them and other hosts that they never reported) and when I call
them up and tell them they usually refund some portion of my monthly bill.

2) I'd like to monitor sites for additional server issues (http error codes,
maybe even add future tests for alerts when speed is a concern)

I wasn't thinking of fixing issues as I think that type of managed service
would be very difficult to coordinate between varying hosts.

I know there are services out there that currently provide 3rd party
monitoring but the idea here is that you don't have to pay unless there is
actually a problem in which case you can probably end up contacting your host
to see what went wrong and potentially get a refund for some or all of your
monthly services (per your contract with the host).

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cpt1138
Just being devil's advocate, but it would be in your best interest to take
sites down.

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smallegan
Hmm, hadn't thought of that, but are you referring to orchestrating DoS
Attacks, etc?

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cpt1138
Yeah or whatever it takes to make money.

