Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing issues. There are numerous services to make setting up a status page simple and inexpensive.

Exactly two years ago, Microsoft announced Teams at an elaborate launch event in New York City. Hailed by many as a “Slack killer“, Teams was positioned by Microsoft as a group messaging platform. It was clear from the start that they took aim directly at Slack and its numerous competitors. Slack even acknowledged the encroachment of Microsoft in a full page ad in the New York Times.

Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.

What does it take to write a GDPR compliant privacy policy? It was easier than we realized! This is a continuation of our series on ensuring StatusGator complies with the terms of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR has very specific requirements for privacy policies. Companies must provide clear and accessible information about the personal data they collect and what they do with it.

Recently, a StatusGator user on our 30 day free trial contacted us to inquire if StatusGator was GDPR compliant. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is the European Union’s regulation that grants rights and requirements over personal data. Although we’ve been following the GDPR and its rollout for some time now, we haven’t taken active steps to comply with its requirements. We are based in the United States and don’t actively target European customers.

Keeping your customers informed of the status of your website, application, or service is essential nowadays. If you don’t have a status page to communicate this, you’re missing an opportunity to improve transparency and reduce customer support burden. This is especially true if you are running an online business and your website is your main source of income, a status page is crucial not only for your business but for your customers as well.

That’s right. You’ve nailed it. Your status page rocks. Your doing all the things right, and so your status page is awesome. Here is why:

StatusGator notifies you when status pages change. But the most overlooked feature of it might just be the unified dashboard that displays the status of every service you depend on. This can save precious minutes during a frantic incident response.

StatusGator is a status page aggregator. We monitor the world’s status pages and provide a unified dashboard which tracks the status pages each user cares about. But how do we collect and normalize all this data? To get started with StatusGator, you choose the services you already use from our list. For each service, you select the specific components from their status pages that you depended on.

Over the past several years, status pages have become more and more commonplace. They are not just a feature of the behemoth cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but common among the multitudinous rank-and-file SaaS companies that every modern business depends on. Having a well-maintained status page is not just a luxury anymore.