Answer for: How do you prefer to hear about scheduled maintenance?
#1 Email
If it has been scheduled then there is time to notify by email.
A subscription list would be the least intrusive option and give customers who may need to react to scheduled maintenance the benefit of a heads up.
This is much better than them having to repeatedly check links. This would have the added benefit of reducing the likelihood of calls and support emails.
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I have to agree. Though squiggle said it much more eloquently - I can be lazy about checking links. E-mails I always get so it's a sure fire way of letting me know.
Years ago we had an email announcement list for technical topics, including scheduled maintenance, and eventually discontinued it (in part) because of the difficulties maintaining the subscriber list in different software than our customer database. Ex-customers reasonably expected to be removed from the list, and we didn't have a good process at the time for accomplishing that in an automated fashion.
The replacement was to provide an RSS feed of our status page: http://status.modwest.com/ (where I am in the midst of publishing a maintenance notification this morning!)
I'll be very interested to see whether the 'Email Notification' option remains highly ranked on this topic.
Don't get me wrong, I both like and use RSS, unfortunately I don't check my RSS feeds daily. Instead, I work through them when I'm able, but email I check day and night and keep on top of.
Here are some observations made with good intentions.
1. I checked the feed and note it's usefulness and that it is "valid" but also unlikely to interact with the widest range of feed readers until a small correction has been made. I'd attach a screenshot, but there's no attachment facility as of yet so here's a link.
http://validator.w3....om%2Ffeed.xml
2. There is no historical maintenance information available at http://status.modwest.com, while I can see the benefits of keeping things simple, I think that historical information can be a good marketing tool for a web host as well as an useful aid to those trouble shooting problems.
3. I also noticed that the uptime had reset to 100%, so I looked to see how it was calculated for the reset date, and couldn't find it. As you are rightfully proud of uptime you might want to consider making the raw data available and graphing it.
4. The feed resides offsite on a different A class network. I understand that is just incase the Modwest network goes down for some reason, but what if the feed's network should go down and this coincided with maintenance work?
5. If the subscriber list is in a bespoke customer database then automation can pull out just the addresses and translate them into a format supported by other software. In fact, because the data you need resides in a system you built you could extend that system to allow people to opt in or out of notifications and then only extract those that have opted in :)
Thanks squiggle. A few responses to your queries:
I've added the atom tags so the feed validates now.
I've increased the 'expiration' time of status updates displaying on the page to 30 days.
The Daily stats reset based on the time settings on our Nagios monitoring server, which I think is GMT/UTC but I'm not sure how exactly it decides that a new "day" has begun.
The status page resides on a dedicated server we lease in a datacenter on the east coast of the US. The idea is that even if we have a complete network outage at our hosting facility, we can still communicate via http://status.modwest.com and http://blog.modwest.com
The custom mailing list based on our customer database is certainly do-able. Just a matter of time/resources to get it done.
You get a thumbs up for that John.