What does it take to write a GDPR compliant privacy policy? It was easier than we realized! This is a continuation of our series on ensuring StatusGator complies with the terms of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR has very specific requirements for privacy policies. Companies must provide clear and accessible information about the personal data they collect and what they do with it.
Recently, a StatusGator user on our 30 day free trial contacted us to inquire if StatusGator was GDPR compliant. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is the European Union’s regulation that grants rights and requirements over personal data. Although we’ve been following the GDPR and its rollout for some time now, we haven’t taken active steps to comply with its requirements. We are based in the United States and don’t actively target European customers.
Keeping your customers informed of the status of your website, application, or service is essential nowadays. If you don’t have a status page to communicate this, you’re missing an opportunity to improve transparency and reduce customer support burden. This is especially true if you are running an online business and your website is your main source of income, a status page is crucial not only for your business but for your customers as well.
That’s right. You’ve nailed it. Your status page rocks. Your doing all the things right, and so your status page is awesome. Here is why:
StatusGator notifies you when status pages change. But the most overlooked feature of it might just be the unified dashboard that displays the status of every service you depend on. This can save precious minutes during a frantic incident response.
StatusGator is a status page aggregator. We monitor the world’s status pages and provide a unified dashboard which tracks the status pages each user cares about. But how do we collect and normalize all this data? To get started with StatusGator, you choose the services you already use from our list. For each service, you select the specific components from their status pages that you depended on.
Over the past several years, status pages have become more and more commonplace. They are not just a feature of the behemoth cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but common among the multitudinous rank-and-file SaaS companies that every modern business depends on. Having a well-maintained status page is not just a luxury anymore.
StatusGator has been monitoring hundreds of status pages since 2015. Our aim has always been to aggregate the published status of the cloud services you depend on, making it available in any format you need, and notifying you when it changes.
If you’ve considered having a status page for your service but are discouraged by the pricing of status page services – consider running an open source status page system like Cachet. This post explains how to install and configure a Cachet status page on the popular DigitalOcean hosting platform. You can run Cachet on DigitalOcean for as little as $5/ month.
StatusGator monitors 411 different status pages, amassing a mountain of data about each. From when they are down and for how long, to what they post, to which pages people monitor the most and everything in between. Using that data, we are proud to present the first of an annual reflection on the past year. The First Annual StatusGator Status Page Awards seeks to applaud (and perhaps gently shame) a number of cloud services that stood out to us among our massive trove of status page data.
