What are Status Pages?

A status pages allows a supplier of a service to let their customers know about outages and issues with their service.  They can be used to show planned maintenance and can hook into e-mail or other update methods but typically they are a website firstly.  Status pages are great; they make things easier for everyone and save time.  If you think you’re having an issue related to a provider you can quickly look at their status page to see if they’re already aware of it before deciding whether or not to contact them.  If they have already acknowledged the problem it also means you don’t need to spend time working out what has changed at your end.

We have one

Our status page status.dogsbody.com, has been running for quite a while. We suggest our customer use it as your first point of call when you spot something odd.  If you’ve got your own server(s) that we maintain, we’ll contact you directly if we start seeing issues.  The status page covers the below…

Support – methods we usually communicate with you

• Email
• Telephone
• Slack

Hosting – our shared hosting servers

• Indigo (our WordPress only hosting)
• Purple (our general purpose hosting)
• Violet (our cPanel hosting)

When we schedule maintenance or have issues we’ll update you via the status page.  If you are an Indigo or Purple customer and want to be notified of issues or maintenance go ahead and subscribe.

You want one

Having an (up to date) status page improves your users experience.  It gives them a quick way to find out what’s going on.  This means they’ll be have a better understanding and (usually) more tolerant of issues you’re already dealing with.

Having a status page is likely to cut down on the number of similar questions you get if you have an outage.  We’ve been really happy with the self-hosted open source software we’re using – Cachet.  We wanted to make sure our status page doesn’t go down at the same time as our other services.  So we’ve used a different server provider to our main infrastructure.  If you want to avoid worrying about that sort of thing, we’ve seen a lot of people are using statuspage.io and status.io.

Feature image background by Wolfgang.W. licensed CC BY 2.0.