On February 28, 2017, Amazon S3 in the us-east-1 region suffered an outage for several hours, impacting huge swaths of the internet. StatusGator was impacted, though I was able to mitigate some of the more serious effects pretty quickly and StatusGator remained up and running, reporting status page changes through the event. Since StatusGator is a destination for people when the internet goes dark, I aim to keep keep it stable during these events.

In 2016, my side project StatusGator garnered enough paying customers to be profitable. I have wanted to document and share what I’ve learned along the way for months. But doing so requires confronting the reality that my side project is not the runaway success that I had hoped it would be, but rather a useful tool for myself and for others, that can exist forever thanks to the fact that it ekes out a meager profit on paper.

When your software goes down, there are two audiences that need to know about it. One: the people who are going to get frustrated and blame you for the inconvenience. Two: the people who can fix the problem. The first audience doesn’t need to know the details of the problem – they just need to know that you’re on top of fixing it, and how long they can expect to wait before full functionality is restored (insofar as you can make a realistic estimate about that).