In order to improve communication and make the status of services clearer, we have prepared a new project for you – WEDOS Status. This is a clear interface where you can find the status of all our services and information about them.
So far, we have informed about problems and outages via social networks, customer administration, help.wedos.cz, push notifications and emails. Each form of notification has its advantages and disadvantages. Nothing is or was optimal, so we came up with a new solution.
- Social networks – We only use our main Facebook and Twitter accounts for alerts in exceptional cases. Not everyone in the company has access to these accounts. We also have automated status accounts where problems on the servers are sent. Information is sent here automatically.
- Customer administration – We put warnings about problems, downtimes, restrictions, etc. On the main page you will also find the Outages, malfunctions and changes section.
- help.wedos.cz – We haven’t used our community website much for such reports so far. Rather, this includes common problems that multiple customers have. If necessary, our moderator will pin the thread up and keep you informed.
- Push notifications – Push notifications are great because the information about the problem reaches you. We can send them out to everyone almost immediately. The downside is that they can’t carry much information and most devices don’t archive it.
- emails – emails are the main communication tool. We use them mainly to notify you of planned outages and when only a certain group of customers is affected. The problem is their limited distribution. It can take hours to alert all our customers. We send out most of the outages for several days so as not to overwhelm the recipient’s mailservers. We don’t want to end up on the blacklists.
WEDOS Status
WEDOS Status basically solves most of the disadvantages of the above mentioned forms of communication.
- It’s outside our infrastructure, so even if you can’t get to us (blockage towards us) you’ll know what’s going on.
- The service is completely independent of devices or third parties. It is a simple HTML page. We are also considering an AMP version.
- WEDOS Status makes it easy to create different outputs. For example, RSS or email or push notifications are planned. This will get the information directly to you. We will bring you more details.
- Data is sent to the service automatically, semi-automatically (requires an active step by one of our employees to complete the information) and manually. For important things like server restart you will see the problem almost immediately, for more complicated ones we can manually insert information about the status of the solution or a link to more information.
- All status changes are logged and archived. We currently have a downtime and outage register for internal use. However, reports are manually entered by technicians or by internal monitoring. WEDOS Status will log and record absolutely everything.
Work with complex data. Our problem detection is based not only on monitoring the services running on the physical server, but also on monitoring the availability of individual websites. This allows us to detect a problem before we need to restart the server, for example. We have been monitoring all websites hosted by us for a long time (several months) and we also monitor all virtual servers etc. in detail. We will share this data with you through WEDOS Status. In other words, you will see for yourself that you are not on an “overloaded server”. However, in recent months we have been spreading the load and there should be no excesses.
Working with smart data. We process 600 – 700 GB of data daily from all servers and devices. We use this data to detect problems, analyse errors and improve our services. You can find a sample output in the article How fast are websites at WEDOS or how many views does the most visited website on NoLimit have? WEDOS Status is ready to connect to this data. In the future, you will be able to see, for example, how many successful/unsuccessful WordPress updates have been made, which plugins our customers are actively using, monitor protection activity, etc.
Conclusion
We have been planning the WEDOS Status service for some time. We have been collecting ideas and suggestions from you and this is the result, actually just the beginning. As you can see, we have really big plans for her.