PSA: using PikaPods for uptime check is unstable reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LewisStudying · 2023-10-24 07:17 With its attractive pricing model and accessible deployment of tools like UptimeKuma, I believe Pikapods might be attractive to people who want to have a self-managed uptime checker as fast and as appropriately priced as possible. However, from my experience with UptimeKuma on Pikapods, it is worth mentioning that: 1. Pikapods does not have a public status page, which means sometimes Pikapods might went down and you will cannot monitor your page any more 2. Pikapods NAT (or whatever infra they have that allow services to reach the internet) is not stable. I have had downtime notification twice every week, and all of them are due to Pikapods unable to reach the internet or some other causes, because I relax the timeout and every settings as much as possible and my site is totally up and running. During this time, I was using uptime robot for my site, too, and did not notice the same kind of issue. I by no means want to compare uptimerobot to pikapods. This is just something to keep in mind because uptime checker is as mission critical as your site, and having downtime affects the overall statistics, which you do not want to show to your customers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ovizii · 2023-10-24 07:49 Your last sentence struck me as odd: "...which you do not want to show to your customers..." excuse me, did you say customers? This is the self-hosted reddit which as far as I can see from the threads being discussed is composed mostly of people hosting stuff at home for various reasons. Also, being a pikapods customer, I never saw pikapods as something I'd use in a business environment. There is no info about availability that I can find and a few more questions I'd need answered before considering using it for business purposes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LewisStudying · 2023-10-24 09:36 cant agree more on that. I guess my case is special because my "customer" include my mother in law, my father in law, and some relatives all using my selfhosted photo server to back up family photos and they are technical enough to receive downtime alerts in telegram. If the downtime shows, they will ping me and ask for questions. Your mileage may vary ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ovizii · 2023-10-24 15:34 I totally understand your usage of the term “customers” now :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- manu_8487 · 2023-10-25 07:42 Hey Lewis, PikaPods founder here. Sorry to hear about your issues. I'll go over each issue you bring up here in detail: Let me first say that we pick our data centers for their stable network. It's extremely rare to see downtime or routing issues at that level. Then you should know that Uptime Kuma had frequent issues with DNS caching a few months ago. There were some PRs to improve the situation by now, but back then it would only try to resolve DNS once and then fail the check. They have since added a local DNS cache. There were also scalability issues due to using SQLite, that become relevant when you use many monitors with a long history and short interval. Here I have offered to pay for conversion to a real database, but the project wasn't started yet. Then we don't have any NAT. Every server that runs pods (I call those "podhost") is directly connected to the internet. No NAT, no internal network. Just the container and then the internet. When comparing Uptime-Kuma to a service like Uptime Robot (which I used before and know well), you should know that they will use multiple points to monitor the uptime and only then mark it as down. To achieve something similar with one server only, you should increase retries in Uptime Kuma. As final exhibit, I'm eating my own dogfood and use Uptime Kuma on PikaPods for our own use. E.g. [here](https://status.borgbase.com/status/default) for our [BorgBase.com](https://BorgBase.com) service. This is for around 30 servers in 3 data centers and shows 100% right now. Time is for a week IIRC. My other instance is internal and for about 60 websites. Except for the flaky ones they are also at 100%. So from what I see, there is no systemic issue with our network or service. But you could hit some Uptime Kuma scalability issues with many monitors or a long history. There is a FAQ on this [here](https://docs.pikapods.com/apps/uptime-kuma/#slow-dashboard-and- operations). (The DNS issue described on the same page is outdated by now and will be removed). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- manu_8487 · 2023-10-25 07:44 Addressing the status page question here: I 100% agree that this should be added. We already have one for our older backup service here. I was putting it of, since less technical users wouldn't be necessarily interested or look for it. One aim of PikaPods is simplicity. Regarding general uptime, you can expect reboots every \~2 months or for urgent security updates. And short downtime for pod updates every 2 weeks. We don't have a highly available setup, since most apps would not support it. What other things would you want to see for business purposes? I do plan on adding a premium tier at a higher price with guaranteed support and uptime at some point in the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ovizii · 2023-10-25 10:52 Generally speaking for business purposed I'd like to see information on service availability, backups, and support channels/times. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- manu_8487 · 2023-10-25 19:36 I admit that info spread out a bit right now. Some is in the FAQ. * Availability taking into account pod and server updates: above 99.95 * Backups: daily to [borgbase.com](https://borgbase.com) (our other service, but separate infra) * Support channel: by email 7 days, 2 timezones, first response time last month was 3h as per Helpscout reporting. We could probably do a business tier with: external automated backups (S3 etc), higher uptime by migrating a pod before reboots and prioritized support. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LewisStudying · 2023-10-27 06:10 Hey u/manu_8487, thank you for your explanation. It makes a lot of sense. Sorry for not diving really deep into Uptime Kuma ( I tried to read its logs but nothing seemed abnormal to me ) and ultimately cast doubts on Pikapods. I might remove this post in a day or two, to concur with some of your claims / facts here, and avoid the situtation where this could show up in google. Thank you for helping me understanding the set up on your side better. By the way, I did not want to do a PSA just for the sake of calling you out but I cannot find a support contact for pikapod and the feedback forum leans toward feature-voting rather than solving vague issues like mine ---------------------------------------------------------------------- manu_8487 · 2023-10-27 17:25 No worries. There is a support button for each pod though. "Report issue". This will also include some details about the pod, so we can debug it quickly. But generally we can't offer much support at the current prices. Like helping with specific app features (there are simply too many and they change quickly). Hence it would be good to have a "business tier" or something. Or pass such leads to app authors (hard to control the quality in that case).