Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
It’s now been two days since we sent out our customer survey and while yesterday’s focus was on server reliability and speed, today has very much been about the way in which we deliver alerts, and more specifically our email notifications to you. At StatusCake we sends hundreds of thousands of email alerts a month – letting you know when you website has gone down, and then when it has come back up.
Whilst the vast majority of our email alerts make their way through the system without any issues we have seen some getting caught by spam filters, others arriving long after we’ve sent them. These issues are not unique to StatusCake, all companies that send the amount of emails we do can face such challenges. But given the importance of getting notified to website downtime, we want to eradicate even the small of issues.
Up until now, email alerts have been out from our own internal IP. We used a dedicated server for the managing and sending of our monitor alerts. But whilst this has been working great in most cases – and in particular enables us to offer unlimited email alerts to all our customers both free and paid accounts – there have been some isolated issues. And we want not only to get rid of those, but also make our service more reliable and better than ever.
SMTP service
So today we decided to move over to a premium email SMTP service – we will in effect be paying for every email sent and with this we can ensure better reliability and speed of service. But rest assured. We will continue to offer unlimited email alerts to all our customers. When it comes to ensuring a better service for our users – the cost to us doesn’t come into the equation – it’s something we want and need to do to improve our website monitoring service.
From today all email alerts will now be recorded through the communication chain to the remote inbox. And when an email addresses that you’ve set-up in a contact group bounces or get rejected we will sent an alert to the account holder’s email (where this is a different email address) and will notify you of the problem with your email address within the control panel. This way you can always be sure that the email address you have set-up for notifications is working – making sure you can be 100% that notifications are going to reach you.
We’ll be running our new SMTP service over the coming few days, with all users being migrated to the premium SMTP service by Tuesday.
SMS text-messages, Boxcar, Pushover and Zapier all work well and we have had no reports of delays on these services (except when one of the services in question has had a fault outside of our control).
As always a huge thank you to people who completed the customer survey – we really do listen to your responses and learn from them.
James Barnes
Share this
More from StatusCake
Alert Noise Isn’t an Accident — It’s a Design Decision
3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.
James Barnes
February 4, 2026
The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most
4 min read In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already
James Barnes
January 28, 2026
When Things Go Wrong, Systems Should Help Humans — Not Fight Them
3 min read In the previous post, we explored how AI accelerates delivery and compresses the time between change and user impact. As velocity increases, knowing that something has gone wrong before users do becomes a critical capability. But detection is only the beginning. Once alerts fire and dashboards light up, humans still have to interpret what’s happening,
James Barnes
January 21, 2026
When AI Speeds Up Change, Knowing First Becomes the Constraint
5 min read In a recent post, I argued that AI doesn’t fix weak engineering processes; rather it amplifies them. Strong review practices, clear ownership, and solid fundamentals still matter just as much when code is AI-assisted as when it’s not. That post sparked a follow-up question in the comments that’s worth sitting with: With AI speeding things
James Barnes
January 14, 2026
Make Your Engineering Processes Resilient. Not Your Opinions About AI
4 min read Why strong reviews, accountability, and monitoring matter more in an AI-assisted world Artificial intelligence has become the latest fault line in software development. For some teams, it’s an obvious productivity multiplier. For others, it’s viewed with suspicion. A source of low-quality code, unreviewable pull requests, and latent production risk. One concern we hear frequently goes
James Barnes
January 8, 2026
Blog
How to monitor IPFS assets with StatusCake
3 min read IPFS is a game-changer for decentralised storage and the future of the web, but it still requires active monitoring to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Daniel
January 9, 2025