StatusPage (YC S13) Lets Anyone Communicate With Customers About Outages | Hacker News Reader

StatusPage (YC S13) Lets Anyone Communicate With Customers About Outages

techcrunch.com

89 pointsdannyolinsky21 comments

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/ is super-awesome.

Thanks Cooper, great to have you guys as a customer.

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

Agreed, appreciate the heads up - looking into now

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.

Thanks!

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.

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.

Thanks! Hope it works well!

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).

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

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) a few days ago?

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.

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.

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!

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

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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