You're browsing your favorite website, clicking around, when suddenly, you're rudely interrupted by a white screen, proclaiming: (I don't mean to pick on Varnish cache here, It's just a screenshot I had handy) As a developer, my eyes scan error messages like these for numbers - in this case, the "503" - indicating that the error isn't my fault, and I can move on with my life.

Last Saturday, our API went down. Not even a funny error message or slightly slower responses either, it just completely vanished off the internet for 18 minutes. I'm not normally one to point fingers at my hosting provider when things go wrong (since ultimately, I chose to use them, so it's my problem to fix), but when fly.io publicly posts on their forums about their reliability issues, I may as well link to them.

I'm excited to be launching onlineornot - OnlineOrNot's newly-built, open source (TypeScript) CLI for managing your uptime checks, all from the comfort of your terminal!