status.fortrabbit.com

We finally have a status page: status.fortrabbit.com — an official channel were we communicate about scheduled maintenances and unscheduled downtimes (aka incidents). You can subscribe to this by mail, SMS or RSS.

Our proccess

Maybe you are thinking about a status page for your startup as well? Here is our journey (no relations).

tl;dr We actually wanted to build something really cool ourselves but we finally ended up using a SaaS for now. First we checked what other PaaS and hosting companies were doing. Well, you find all kind of things in this space: from tumblr-blogs, to wordpress-blogs (not so bad!), to twitter-hacks, to simple-lists, to really-fancy-looking-custom-made-futuristic-designs. The first we have learned is that a status page is not so much about real time metrics and automatic system status aggregation, a status page is mostly about communication from human to human.

One concern is of course that our status page must be up, even when the whole system is down and also when AWS is down. The open source solution stashboard from Twilio is an obvious candidate, as it runs on the Google App Engine Cloud. It's free, easy to setup and skin. However we were missing some features, adding means a lot of hacking and the repo looks a bit neglected. Developer hybris: building something on our own? Hm when should it be done 2015? Well then let's have a look at the commercial solutions, Statuspage as a Service. We've checked out StatusHub, Status.io and Statuspage.io and settled with the last one from Scott, Steve and Danny for now.

It's mixed feelings. $80 bucks monthly or even more for something you can hack together in one or two days is pricey — maybe too much hype?. But some of the ideas/concepts/details are really nice and exactly the way they should be.

So that's it for now, i hope not to see the system an action too soon. Things will go down one day for sure.