StatusGator monitors 411 different status pages, amassing a mountain of data about each. From when they are down and for how long, to what they post, to which pages people monitor the most and everything in between. Using that data, we are proud to present the first of an annual reflection on the past year. The First Annual StatusGator Status Page Awards seeks to applaud (and perhaps gently...
Recently, we began using IP geolocation within StatusGator to learn where are users are located. We are happy to say that it’s working out well. We hoped to use these insights to tune our marketing. To that end, we added the Ahoy gem to help collect information related to how our advertising campaigns are going. The Ahoy gem also uses the geolocation gem to look up IP addresses. This...
Introduction On February 28, 2017, Amazon S3 in the us-east-1 region suffered an outage for several hours, impacting huge swaths of the internet. StatusGator was impacted, though I was able to mitigate some of the more serious effects pretty quickly and StatusGator remained up and running, reporting status page changes through the event. Since StatusGator is a destination for people when the...
Background In 2016, my side project StatusGator garnered enough paying customers to be profitable. I have wanted to document and share what I’ve learned along the way for months. But doing so requires confronting the reality that my side project is not the runaway success that I had hoped it would be, but rather a useful tool for myself and for others, that can exist forever thanks to the...
There is simply no substitute for a well-tested project that deploys early and often. GitHub famously boasted about 175 deployments in one day, and that was 3 years ago. Even Facebook ships new code every single day. There are now entire products dedicated to shipping code and continuous deployment. As a team leader for nearly 15 years, I’ve often found myself striving for more frequent...
Update February 9, 2019: The Blinkenlights iOS app has not been updated in quite some time and we have removed support for it from StatusGator. If you still need Blinkenlights support, please contact us. Blinkenlights is an awesome new app for iOS by Chad Etzel, which allows you to monitor special JSON endpoints and produce a simple status page of “lights” reminiscent of an array of...
One of the most requested features from our early adopters has been webhooks: a way to specify a URL that is pinged whenever a service status changes. Web hooks have long been a tool used by many companies to allow powerful integrations. Some status page providers, even allow their own webhooks. But a unified way to be notified of status changes to any cloud service has not existed. Until now:...
How I Scratched an Itch to Build a Useful Product in a Weekend Modern web applications are built upon a myriad of hosted services. For better or for worse, the health of every app or website built is now dependent on the health of easily a dozen other services. This is the price we pay in exchange for fantastic reductions in time to market. Why, then, is there no easy way to see the health of all...