Hosted server status pages for startups | Hacker News Reader

Hosted server status pages for startups

statuspage.io

48 pointswgx25 comments

We use StatusPage for our app, and it's been great. On the surface, it may look like something that easily be replicated by a simple blog or Tumblr account, but that's definitely not the case.

They seamlessly integrate the status history as well as letting us easily post to Twitter when there is a problem. They also provide a feed and reliable infrastructure separate from our own that integrates with monitoring tools.

When your app is offline, it's a huge relief to be able to easily update Twitter and have a central location for clear status information without having to go to Twitter and Tumblr or wherever and tie everything together.

It's certainly not cheap, but compared to building, hosting, and maintaining an equivalent service, it's a great deal. Some of their more advanced features, like allowing customers to sign up for text alerts are great as well if you need it.

The service is way more than just a hosted Tumblr account, and I'd definitely recommend them if you're looking for something like this.

Good deity that's a pricey service for what could be achieved on a free web blog (tumblr, wordpress, etc)

That's what I was thinking. I'm creating an SaaS that involves 10 times more complexity and planning to charge the same amt per month. Then again, it's all about value.. but still, I don't see the $100/month value in this.

Then there are also automated scripts for server monitoring with html real time displays http://www.myinstantwebsite.com/servermon/

Seems like potential pitfall that they appear to be hosted on AWS, given that many of their clients are probably also hosted on AWS.

We're using StatusPage and we host on AWS. We decided this was acceptable because they're in multiple AZs in a datacenter that isn't our primary.

The (minor) risk presented by that is softened further by the fact that it's a communication tool, and we have other ways to communicate status with the team and with customers.

One slightly annoying thing, if I'm logged into manage.statuspage.io and I browse to statuspage.io, please don't redirect me back to manage.statuspage.io. I really did want to re-read your web site content whilst fiddling around trying this out for the first time. Don't make me log out to do this.

Also, after having logged out I browsed to statuspage.io (exactly what I typed) which redirected me to https://www.statuspage.io and Chrome complains that some content is not secure.

Other than that I've passed the url around some of our folks to see if we could use this.

Maybe I am too old fashioned but I don't get this service.

Typically I would have Nagios/ HP OpenView/ Unicenter/Tivoli monitoring my applications -- the application agent would page/text/email prod support whenever the app goes down and also it would automatically configure NGINX to redirect everyone to "ooops we are having technical dificulties" page.It wouldn't take more than a day to configure assuning you have Nagios/OpenView/Unicenter etc in place . This is pretty mundane stuff to implement. And that is why I don't get this service.

The selling point is that it's a service not at the mercy of your network or hosting infrastructure. It's hosted by someone else and across multiple AWS zones, so in theory your customers should always be able to hit your status page, regardless of whether your entire AS has taken a hit.

Also it's aimed at startups who may not necessarily have all their automatic status page bits in play on their own infra.

Finally, I'd rather have human control over what I consider to be the the operational status of my various platform services rather than letting nagios or some other automated. There's a very thin lines between "Degraded Performance" and more critical situations, humans are better at deciding that.

Except that it looks like it was reading from New Relic, etc. So if you're collecting that data already, you have no problem doing devops to spit out a static status page for a simple web server to host.

And the pricing is considerably higher than popping an arbitrary number of VPS on internationally diverse hosting providers (or generated HTML on Google Sites, Github, and Rackspace Cloud Sites, or generated HTML cached by CloudFlare, or whatever). A status page shouldn't cost a dedicated 8-way Xeon or 25 Google Apps accounts.

That said, if it were priced differently, I'd recommend it in a heartbeat. Looks great, does what it needs to.

For ecommerce sites, customers would hardly care to see the status of my servers. They would just go to competitors.

It would make sense for SaaS sites for the black swan event -- the whole network infrastructure/rack cage going down. I can see how $5 per month would be justified for SaaS to be notified of a network blowout event.

Can this service host selenium scripts that walks a browser through several key pages of a site and monitor the page load/response time ? I would pay more for that.

I agree it's not for everyone, but I can see its usefulness for a number of service scenarios such as PaaS/SaaS.

I signed up for a trial (no CC required), and there's integration support for Pingdom, New Relic and Webmon. i.e. you can get these to send email alerts to status.io which then parses them to set the service status. e.g. http://doers.statuspage.io/integrations/pingdom/

There's also support for pulling in metrics from Pingdom, New Relic, Librato, TempDB and Datadog and displaying nice graphs: http://doers.statuspage.io/public-metrics/introduction/

It would be nice I guess if you could send your own nagios notifications or poll a custom data source in addition to these other commercial services.

I recently used Neustar to do this. It has great integration with selenium-style scripts for load testing and monitoring.

https://home.wpm.neustar.biz

http://www.neustar.biz/enterprise/web-performance/

The upshot for us is that we can let customers know not just that we're having an issue, but also details about the issue that might impact the service. As a SaaS API, its important that we give good transparency into even minor blips in the service. Statuspage.io isn't as customizable as I would like it to be, but it makes it really easy for someone not on the dev team to manage communication while others fix the problem. Also, its hella straightforward to set up and use. http://status.stormpath.com/

Is there a way to decide if certain aspects of the page are up? Say test if #dashboard is rendering properly by checking a text present in the container. Many sites are mashups and even the site responding to pings doesn't mean it will render properly to the user.

Or if you'd like an open-source alternative, deployable on Google App Engine, Twilio has produced this: http://www.stashboard.org/

That domain isn't active and is in the process of being auctioned. Typo perhaps?

You're right. I just fixed the URL.

Not a bad service, if you don't make your own this is a way to go. The fact is before I bring a service or app into my company this is one of the primary things I look for. If you can't communicate with me when things are broken then I can't rely on you.

The problem I see with this is that the market is too narrow. Most small to medium size webapps wouldn't care. There aren't enough big ones and those you can't charge too much. I'm sure it's a useful service, but will it be profitable?

They have Vimeo and Disqus as customers already, that seems like a decent start to me...

We are using this at ShopKeep[1]. The co-founder was nice enough to let us get it set up for free, and start paying for it later once our issues settled down.

[1]: http://status.shopkeep.com

Is there a status page for statuspage.io? None of the images (other than graphs) are showing for me in Chrome. (Edit with example: http://imgur.com/Fgna1vg)

But what happens when they're down? ;) (C'mon, it's Friday)

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401470

Reply on news.ycombinator.com