How & Why We Built a Bytemark Status Site
One of our manifesto principles is an ongoing commitment to transparency and clear communication. That’s why since 2005, we have detailed every outage affecting our products and network on our public forum.
In 2015, we built on that commitment by launching a dedicated Bytemark Status site (https://status.bytemark.org) where we have continued to report all service interruptions and outages.
Why was the site launched?
We wanted to take the forum back to what it was designed to be, a space for discussion about all things tech. Having a separate, offsite location for reporting issues gives outages the space and context they deserve, while allowing discussions to continue on as normal on the forum.
It also makes it easier for you to track your service as you can access the dedicated subdomain from the top navigation on all pages on the main website. Just click where it says ‘Status’.
How did we do it?
The development of the status site was driven by your feedback about our outage notifications. Some helpful new features include:
- “Is my site down?” – a search that lets you work out if a current outage may impact your services. You can also email the results of your search directly to Bytemark Support.
- Clearer “no issues” message, so you don’t need to review a list of posts that may or may not impact on your service. There’s also an open issues counter at the top of every page.
- Our Bytemark website and Panel Dashboard have been updated to display some information from our Status site as well.
- Each issue post features the name and type of asset that is affected, an estimated resolution time and all other features that go along with reporting an incident.
- A history of outages, neatly tagged under “resolved”.
- RSS feeds for new issues, all issues and resolved issues.
- It is hosted off-network — in the case of serious outages, we’ll still be able to report what’s going on.
Please try out the status site at https://status.bytemark.org and let us know what you think!
Update: Since the launch, further improvements have been made to the status site. Read more about the added features here.
Kim Witten, Developer @ Bytemark
