Status page launched last week and 50 users are trying it out so far. If you're one of the first users, please let me know if you'd like to see anything improved. I'll run through what I've been working on in the first week of the service below.

Recent Changes

You can see the broader changes that have been made since launch on the public roadmap, but here is a summary of the smaller points as well:

• Send alerts on outages - this is now in testing for paid accounts
• Exponential backoff on status checks if a service is down
• Added status on services to allow suspending them
• Moved api behind a load balancer and added another instance
• Added flags for paid accounts, and allow multiple services for those accounts
• Fixed permissions on adding a new service and uploading logos

Project Page api downtime

The uptime of the project page api has gone down this month to 99.95% due to some over-zealous checking from the status checker service, and maintenance for server updates. It's not significant downtime, but I'd prefer if this service was at 100%.

This was caused by some services which were permanently down or had certificate errors, which caused more frequent checks from the status checker, and more calls to the api service than it could handle.I've added exponential backoff on status checks and added another api server behind a load balancer to mitigate this.

Event editing

I'm currently testing allowing editing the alert text, and adding comments, so that you can report incidents to users easily from the status page screen. and give them the reasons for an outage for example.

Show only significant events

I'd also like to consider filtering events so that only significant ones show up (or perhaps are recorded). We have a second check presently , so I may expose the interval for that on the service.

Downtime alerts

The api will now alert you if your service has been down, by email or SMS. This is currently in testing with some users and is working well, please contact me if you'd like to try it out yourself (either email or SMS alerts).

Status Page is now available. Status page offers a hosted status page for your project, showing status history and providing reassurance for your customers that you won't hide behind a vague or inaccurate status page, even if things are broken.

It also offers alerts (via email or SMS) for your team so that you can fix outages before customers even notice there is a problem. You can try it out for free by signing up here.

Project page was started to help companies emulate some of the most successful new startups, which place communication with customers at the heart of what they do - they talk to customers early and often and maintain the communication through blogs, roadmaps, and community forums. We offer similar tools to other companies who want to connect with their customers in a genuine and open way, and benefit from the insight customers can give. So we're building the tools we'd like to see every company using to communicate with customers.

Status Page - tell the truth about status

Too many projects have a static status page which doesn't reflect real-time incidents in real-time (or anything close to it). At many large companies like AWS or Cloudflare, an incident is over before it even appears on the status page, and the messaging is managed manually by humans rather than automatically updated. We believe in a more transparent approach, which is honest about downtime (everyone has it), and honest about uptime. Very few services need or reach 5 nines 99.999 of uptime, but you can come close.

Roadmap - share your plans

Customers want to know what you're building, and when. Priorities and progress change all the time, so it can be difficult to keep customers up to date with your plans as things change. That's why a roadmap tied to your issues list, displaying those issues you feel are most important, without displaying all the detail, is a great way to communicate which things you want to work on next.

Triage - Issues that don't suck

Triage looks at issues lists from another angle - that of communicating with customers and stakeholders the priorities of the project, and tying in with other tools like roadmap and a schedule to show which issues are important to work on next. If you're tired of spending your days in Jira, Bitbucket or Github, this product might interest you.