In a slightly similar theme, my wife and I had a terrible experience with a BnB we booked through Booking.com about a year ago. We left what we felt was a balanced review and a 7/10 rating. We were mostly happy with our stay (which we mentioned in the review) barring some issues with noise emanating from the pool and staff kitchen, and the quality of the breakfast (stale, cold, and flavourless).

What followed was a flood of emails, WhatsApps, and phone calls from the owners/managers attempting to emotionally blackmail us by telling us that people would be fired due to our "low score" of 7/10, unless we could somehow either retract or improve the rating.

We left the review as-is and blocked them, but it makes us think twice about leaving reviews now just to avoid the potential harassment. I feel review systems are slightly broken, and the incentives are in the wrong place.

Title is misleading - these domain names are not "free" from a monetary perspective, which would be the common association IMO. They're freely available for purchase, as in the domain name is not currently registered.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431224

This topic inspired my co-founder and I to build dbsupervisor.com as a tool to monitor database health, and offer opinionated suggestions to improve product uptime and performance.

As others have pointed out, traditional DBA roles are fading away due to cloud offerings abstracting many of the problems DBA’s would otherwise be responsible for. Hardware is cheaper and more available which means that companies throw more RAM/CPU at their problems, whilst areas like index planning, performance tuning, query optimisation, and resource monitoring take a back seat. In our experience, this eventually catches up to you in the form of poor performance and unhappy customers.

We believe that tech can augment most of the insights offered by a traditional DBA and help avoid these pains early on, especially for smaller teams with limited database expertise. We’re currently in private beta, but will be opening up more broadly in the coming weeks. We’d love to get your feedback on our approach - sign up for the beta or AMA if you have any questions!