Volunteer — Ted @ The Digital Orchard
West Coast of Canada, Pacific Time Zone (PST/PDT)
Further suggestions:
status.runbox.com — Looks good with just the NodePing table and manual updates, but suggest that DATE and TIME be very clear. Currently, a date is missing, or scattered throughout the incremental updates, which is confusing. Using a timezone of CET is fine, but lacks context for those in other timezones, so a relative timestamp can be useful (eg. “5 minutes ago”, “3 hours ago”, etc.). WordPress likely has plugins to support this. Presently, those of us in other timezones would need to manually translate the times posted to understand when an update was made, and that’s not helpful.
Detailed System Status (NodePing page) — Display the automated log updates here to explain why the uptime of a given service is less than the industry-standard 99.9% goal. This was useful to provide details before, during and after your manual updates.
I just want to provide some context for my own postings here, and on Twitter.
I hold Runbox to a very high standard for one very simple reason — Runbox is the chosen email provider for my businesses (3 of them!) and our clients’ businesses (several!). While the service itself lacks a proper “Reseller/Tenant” setup and business-oriented configuration options, your own website advertises that the service is designed to support businesses.
So when an outage happens, it’s not just affecting one less-than-critical personal account that we may have. It has a broad impact across many businesses all at once, and we get an influx of questions from our customers about why their email is not working. When we don’t get timely updates from Runbox, we don’t know what to tell our customers. It’s that simple.
We are not reselling Runbox, but we are utilizing Runbox as your own website advertises — to provide business-class email services. Our clients are not technically-minded. They rely on us to set up their email services, and Runbox fits the bill for the most part. We just need a higher standard for how outages are handled — and you’re doing a great job at improving that. Thanks!
We completely understand your comments from a business perspective and sincerely appreciate you choosing Runbox for your own and your customers email service needs.
We provide services to many small businesses like yourself for whom email is a critical service. This is a market segment we are looking to expand further into, and precisely for that reason your constructive criticism is all the more important to us.
We are evaluating various alternatives for closer communication with regards to monitoring and responding to incidents, although our overarching goal is to minimize the need for such responses altogether.
Thanks again for your continued support from our entire team.
We have made some minor additional adjustments to the Service Status page, including the addition of the US EST time zone in the most recent post.
We’ve attempted to find a WordPress plugin that will convert timestamps into other time zones but this does not appear to exist, so we will have to manually include other time zones in each update.
Perhaps also consider having the links in the standard blue color - having them in black makes it difficult to tell what is a header and what could be a link.