Hi There

Today I was asking me how can I inform all my customers if there is a problem with a server. I mean if everything is down for a few hours and I don't know it bevor? What do you think about to inform the customers per SMS, Mailinglist or a extern technical website? I'm really wondering what other suggestion you do have. I think it's a very important thing to inform all the customers of the servers if there is a problem. Are they any solutions? Monitoring, etc?

Thanks for your part.

Claudius

I think the best and easiest way, is when you add a client, manually add them to a mail list program. There are tons of them out there, I like the one from solutionscripts.com. So when it is time to mail them info on the server, you just send it out, nice a quick.

Only problem with this for us is that 25% of our users only have the email accounts that we host for them. So they wouldn't get it until the mail server or whatever was back up.

We just use a mirror site for our network status page.

I find it hard to belive that it is their only one, most people get a email from their isp. But also some people do not check their isp mail. The best thing I would suggest that you can do is make a network status page, and put information there, and tell your clients to check that page occasionally and to check it first if something goes down.

you should try to have an alternate email address from all of your customers for such purposes

We have a contact email address for all of our users. Around 25% of them have updated their contact email address to one that we host for them.

I truly believe that they probably don't have the account that they used when they signed up.

Network status page is probably the best bet because you can always garauntee that they will be able to receive the information, they client can't say that they didn't get the email.

yes, then a network status page would be good or even a phone announcement if your phone answer system is interactive