You’ve just resolved an incident – congrats! High-fives and #HugOps all around.

StatusHub is a flexible incident (crisis/status) and event communication tool that helps you keep your impacted staff and end users updated effectively Its efficient communication mechanisms create a beneficial environment of trust and transparency for the people that rely on your company.

Every company depends on tools that help them do their jobs. HR tools, CRMs, chat & collaboration tools, business intelligence tools, marketing automation tools… the list goes on. Bringing another tool into the mix involves approval processes, buy-in from execs, and the occasional boss-nudging for her credit card.

Today we’ve got a few new additions to take you through, and you can expect some other changes still to come as the week progresses!

Over the years here at Statuspage we’ve probably heard every version of the open source vs. paid status page argument. While we’re obviously fans of the SaaS model, we also know there are a lot of advantages to an open source status page for a lot of teams. We’ve even recommended that route to some potential customers we thought would have a better experience hosting their own open source page.

Nothing puts a drag on IT service teams and customer support teams like answering the same question across multiple tickets. Outages and incidents have a way of sending these teams an avalanche of duplicate tickets. During a service interruption, tickets start flying in, the team can’t keep up, and end users have a bad experience made even worse.

The unfortunate reality about running a web service is that every now and again, you’re going to have downtime. Even the best web companies have the occasional blip in service. If downtime is inevitable, then it’s best to plan ahead so that you can be ready. After all, prior preparation prevents poor performance.

Uptime Status Pages can now be shared publicly. You will find that they are a useful tool for information sharing under a variety of circumstances. Internal pages offer excellent insight for your team, but public status pages provide users and other parties helpful information about your services and websites.

The goal of a planned maintenance announcement should be to get the right people informed and confident about the upcoming maintenance. Here’s our guide to announcing scheduled maintenance, along with some examples from our friends who are doing it well.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.