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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
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