News

Why we use a separate domain

More and more companies are offering their customers up-to-date information on the status of their systems. However, there is a good reason not to publish this information directly (or at least not exclusively) on the company website, e.g. at example.com/status or status.example.com: Such information is required exactly in the event that central components – potentially including the company website – have failed.

At cloudscale.ch we pay particular attention to preventing potential failures through redundancy at all levels whenever possible. However, we also think through those scenarios in which something fails nevertheless and carefully examine how the effects thereof can be limited in the best ways possible. Especially in case of a malfunction we want to avoid that corresponding information is affected by that malfunction as well – no matter where the exact problem is located.

Hence, we operate our status page not only on separate hardware, but also in a different data center than our cloud infrastructure, including a separate internet uplink. With the same determination, we have chosen the domain name: We decided to go with the address https://www.cloudscale-status.net and corresponding DNS servers so we can continue to inform you even in the event of a failure of the ".ch" name servers.

Which tools and technologies we use

For the operation of our status page we rely on Cachet. This tool is easy to use and adapt and has already proven itself with some of our partners. Nginx is used as the web server and a certificate from "Let's Encrypt" for TLS-protected data transmission.

In addition to displaying the latest maintenance announcements and status information via browser, Cachet also supports querying the corresponding information via RSS and Atom feeds. If you prefer to be informed about new announcements and updates by email, you can subscribe directly on the status page. Of course, these emails are sent independently of our cloud infrastructure, too.

How we use the different channels of communication

Information about the current status of our systems and planned maintenance work can now be found 24/7 on our new status page at https://www.cloudscale-status.net. Of course, we have also placed a link to the status page on our website. However, we recommend that you add the status page directly to your bookmarks so that you still have access to the latest status information even in case of unexpected problems.

Should maintenance work require any action on your part (e.g. the restart of a server), we will continue to send you the respective information directly to the email address of your user account. Please make sure that this address is up-to-date and inform us of any changes.

All systems operational!
Your cloudscale.ch team