I searched long and hard for an idea on how I could celebrate #whyday. In the end, I decided to launch a new website service that I (and I’m hoping a few others) have a need for: StatusBench.com
Status Bench is a service that provides an easy-to-use status or health dashboard. It performs the same function as http://www.google.com/appsstatus or http://status.37signals.com. This allows you to have an independent site that is not part of your normal infrastructure. When and if your site has downtime or outages, your customers will be able to rely on your status page to get updates about what is going on.
StatusBench.com screenshot
The current featureset is small, but solid:
- Set up multiple status sites under your account
- Use your own domain name: ‘http://status.YOUR-DOMAIN.com’
- Each site can have multiple services underneath it for different parts of your app that may need independent updates
- Each service can be in the states of: ‘Normal’, ‘Degraded’, ‘Offline’
- Post multiple event updates about each service (mini-blog style)
I plan to add a lot of awesome new things in the future, so please look out for:
- RSS Feed
- History of updates / status over time
- API to automatically change service status
- E-mail subscriptions
- SMS alerts
- Twitter / Facebook / OpenID integration
- Put your logo on the status page
- Style your status page to your liking
Of course, any suggestions or ideas are welcome. E-mail: support ~~AT~~ statusbench.com for whatever you need and I’ll help as much as I can.
This is a first draft of the service and I intend to expand it significantly (release-early and all that). I’ll probably be adding premium options at some point as well. But for now, I hope you enjoy the service and find good uses for it.
Happy #whyday
Drew Blas - Explorer 