HN ran on a box at Softlayer until early 2018 or so. This makes me think that the title of this post (which was submitted as "IBM Cloud down as well as their status page which looks to be hosted there") could at some point have been "IBM Cloud down as well as their status page which looks to be hosted there as well as the forum where people post these things which also looks to be hosted there".
I've always imagined it as a big tower shoved under someone's desk. The side panel of the case is off because otherwise it overheats. On the screen there's a single maximized window of DrRacket. A post it note warns you not to quit or reboot the system.
If it was a BGP issue, it's not a problem of where the status page is hosted but instead that you just can't get to it via that name no matter where it's hosted, right?
If by "name" you mean hostname, not really. If you have a domain with multiple nameservers in multiple countries on multiple providers, and your site is similarly globally distributed, at least a few people on the internet will always be able to pull up your site. So at least some of your clients will be able to resolve a domain address from at least some of your nameservers and connect to at least some of your web servers. Geo-IP and Anycast are also really useful here.
edit: It's possible that you could take out an entire TLD and make it impossible to resolve domains on that TLD once all the cached records expire. But that kind of targeted attack would not be possible with a BGP error, unless it was a very specifically crafted BGP error happening over a very long period of time (weeks-months-years depending on the record TTLs).
ok, that makes sense but you'd still at least have: if the site is down due to BGP then so is the status page that is on the same domain.
I guess I'm just calling out the people who are making fun of them for having their status page dependent on the same hardware it's monitoring when it's not clear that's the case just because they are both down?
I would suppose if it's a different TLD domain, then it would be more likely to conclude that.
A status page should be a static site hosted on multiple providers in multiple regions with multiple nameservers. So, Amazon S3 hosted in 2 regions, Azure Storage hosted in 2 different regions, 2 different nameserver providers in 2 different countries using two different backend colo providers. Costs probably <$150/year and that will survive BGP outages, backhaul link outages, hosting provider outages, DNS outages.
I'm not going to make fun of them for their status page being down, but it certainly doesn't reflect well on the brand/products.
