Recently, we began using IP geolocation within StatusGator to learn where are users are located. We are happy to say that it’s working out well. We hoped to use these insights to tune our marketing. To that end, we added the Ahoy gem to help collect information related to how our advertising campaigns are going. The Ahoy gem also uses the geolocation gem to lookup IP addresses. This significantly increased the number of IP geolocation lookups.

StatusGator is built on Ruby on Rails, a popular choice for rapid web application development for more than a decade. One of the many benefits of Rails is its rich ecosystem of open source gems which can provide massive value quickly. We discovered one such gem, Ahoy, on our recent quest to understand how our users find out about StatusGator.

StatusGator has a few thousand users. Recently I grew curious as to where you all are. Surely it would be interesting to learn a little about where they are from. The results are pretty interesting. I’m pleased to report StatusGator helps users in 85 different countries!

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.

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.