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.
StatusGator has been monitoring hundreds of status pages since 2015. Our aim has always been to aggregate the published status of the cloud services you depend on, making it available in any format you need, and notifying you when it changes.
If you’ve considered having a status page for your service but are discouraged by the pricing of status page services – consider running an open source status page system like Cachet. This post explains how to install and configure a Cachet status page on the popular DigitalOcean hosting platform. You can run Cachet on DigitalOcean for as little as $5/ month.
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 shame) a number of cloud services that stood out to us among our massive trove of status page data.
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 lookup IP addresses. This significantly increased the number of IP geolocation lookups.
StatusGator is built on Ruby on Rails, a popular choice for rapid web application development for more than a decade. One of the many benefits of Rails is its rich ecosystem of open source gems which can provide massive value quickly. We discovered one such gem, Ahoy, on our recent quest to understand how our users find out about StatusGator.
StatusGator has a few thousand users. Recently I grew curious as to where you all are. Surely it would be interesting to learn a little about where they are from. The results are pretty interesting. I’m pleased to report StatusGator helps users in 85 different countries!
For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.
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 internet goes dark, I aim to keep keep it stable during these events.
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 fact that it ekes out a meager profit on paper.
