
StatusPage (YC S13) Lets Anyone Communicate With Customers About Outages - dannyolinsky
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/statuspage-lets-anyone-communicate-with-customers-about-errors-and-outages/
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coopr
Boom! Me and a number of my colleagues here at New Relic love this - our
status page via StatusPage.io at
[http://status.newrelic.com/](http://status.newrelic.com/) is super-awesome.

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devonnulled
The SSL errors could freak a few people out who don't know what's going on:

    
    
      status.newrelic.com uses an invalid security certificate.
    
      The certificate is only valid for the following names:
        *.statuspage.io , statuspage.io

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dannyolinsky
Agreed, appreciate the heads up - looking into now

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covati
Well done guys! Having played with it early on, I can see that you've done a
lot to make it even easier to use. I love the custom metrics too, we'll be
looking at how we can incorporate some of our info into our page soon.

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stevenklein
Thanks!

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gingerlime
Looks totally great! We're using pingdom and were considering using their
status page, but it is not customizable enough. For example, we want to show
availability, but not response-time. This seems much more flexible. Will
definitely look into this.

A couple of questions/comments:

* On the demo/video on the home page when you add an incident, the popup modal says "Report Report New Incident" (report appears twice)

* I'm not sure I understand the pricing, even after reading the FAQ. It says "What is a subscriber? A subscriber is somebody who gets email, SMS, or webhook notifications about your page. They can sign up to be auto-opted-in to all notifications, or on an incident-by-incident basis. Note that notifications are optional.". Can I have a status page, but limit how many subscribe to it? or not allow any subscribers at all? Does RSS count towards the subscriber limit??

Otherwise, great job guys. Will try to give this a spin soon.

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ianstormtaylor
I have to say, the introductory tour of the StatusPage app is probably one of
the best I have ever seen. I plan on lifting a bunch of ideas from it for our
own new intro to Segment.io — really nice work to whoever was involved with
it. Makes getting setup ridiculously trivial.

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stevenklein
Thanks! Hope it works well!

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mrclark411
Great work guys. I'm sure you've heard a hundred times that this idea is too
small or too something, but it is executed super well. Hopefully we can get
our own moved over from Google Sites (yikes).

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dannyolinsky
Much appreciated, let us know if we can help out with the migration.

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kjhughes
Can StatusPage.io, when it detects an outage, _automatically_ have traffic
routed to a static "emergency mode" page such as was discussed here
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033147))
a few days ago?

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scootklein
Are you asking about us having an outage on our site, or you having an outage
on your site? If the latter, you could definitely set up a redirect like the
mentioned article to forward all of your traffic to your status page. We'll be
doing a similar integration with Heroku for their maintenance and error pages.

~~~
kjhughes
Right, I'm asking about us, as a prospective customer, having an outage on our
site.

I only skimmed (and bookmarked / todo'ed) the "emergency mode" article. I
haven't dug into it yet. Maybe it's not much work, but in the spirit of
offloading the status page work to a SaaS provider such as StatusPage.io, I
wondered if StatusPage.io couldn't also allow me to cross "set up an emergency
mode site" off my list by solving the whole site-down communication problem at
once.

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lucb1e
Their website loads so slow, I'd almost consider it to be down... Besides
that, looks pretty great. I very much like the notification options on the
status page!

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ejain
This company will be bought by New Relic in 3... 2... 1...

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iamjustlooking
Looks amazing guys, public metrics looks like a really killer feature. Hope to
be able to afford to spend $80/month on this in the future!

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dannyolinsky
Thanks! Let us know if you sign up in the future and we can be helpful at all.
Will have some more features coming down the pipe built around Public Metrics
as well.

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seivan
Woah this is actually a pretty brilliant idea. Could make for a decent SaaS
with a nice income as well. Keep it lean guys!

~~~
dannyolinsky
Thanks seivan - if you sign up for an account and have any feedback for us,
feel free to send it my way

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ShabbyDoo
A couple weekends ago, I drove with my two young children to a restaurant 20
minutes from our house only to learn that it, a mom-n-pop operation, was
closed for a couple of weeks. I suppose I could have called ahead to confirm
my presumption that they were open, but I didn't learn about this "planned
outage" until I saw the 8.5 x 11 sign on the door. Apparently, they closed for
a family vacation.

It would be cool to have some sort of proactive notification when the many
assumptions I make about the world around me become incorrect. Take a person's
work commute as an example. Presumptions include road availability, public
transit timeliness, lack of major events causing traffic delays, sufficient
fuel in one's vehicle, the line at Starbucks being reasonable, no horrible
weather forecast which would require bringing an umbrella along, etc. Imagine
an app which invoked a bunch of figurative assert statements on the
presumptions we make daily in life.

I'm posting this here simply because it entered my stream of consciousness
when I saw the headline. At first, I thought that "real world" status is un-
related to the problem StatusPage solves. However, sending notifications to
customers upon an outage is a step closer to my handwaving above. Take as an
example the availability of employee VPN access. How many times have you gone
home early presuming that you would be able to work later in the evening and
later realized that you can't kick off that build, etc. While learning that
the VPN server is down doesn't help you do your work, you probably are more
likely to find that your co-worker is still at the office at 7:00 PM than
three hours later. Maybe you would have been lucky enough to learn about the
outage before you left the office.

One problem I see is that being alerted about every presumption violation
would be annoying. I'd like to infer intent somehow. "I'm going to work today"
implies a lot about what's important for me to know. Being informed about
"outages" certainly would be an incentive to put a zillion things on my
calendar. What if you were planning to see a band at a bar next Thursday, and
adding the event to your calendar somehow allowed proactive notification in
case of cancellation?

We take it as a given that life will surprise us with disappointments, but
this condition might only be the result of historically high costs of sending
and receiving notifications. Does anyone remember phone trees? Watching the TV
to learn of school closings? Making detailed logistical plans about how to
meet-up with friends (along with various contingencies) in the days before
mobile phones? Technology replaced these annoyances, and there's no reason to
believe all progress has been made. I want the absence of notifications to
imply that life will abide by my presumptions.

