How do you keep customers informed?

CloudyBlake

I could see a case for an internal and optional external status page of all servers in the cluster.

Internally, I'd like to know what server doing what. For now the home page for admin kind of covers this.

For customers, I would rather it be grouped by role, web, email, dns, etc. If a server in that role is having an issue then it's flagged. (I could see this getting a little tricky)

XN-Matt

Potentially a start but for those who want to contact those customers by either means ahead of time (i.e planned work), there seems to be no way to do this proactively.

Equally, let's say you have servers and the CP one location which is having issues, other locations may be fine. Those customers could be in the dark.

CloudyBlake

XN-Matt To me this would be better handled by a mailing list, but you'd need a way to export all the user emails from that enhance server to drop into the mailing list.

XN-Matt

CloudyBlake I agree, hence my original post 🙂

It's what we do with cPanel now as we always know what server any specific account/user is on, not possible to know programmatically (as far as I can see) with Enhance.

Although we don't need the emails. The way i'd see it working is respective billing module could poll this data when it collects usage information (so it is updated regularly). We'd sync our mailing list data as we do now with said billing engine and then pull that extra data to create segments i.e "web users on server xyz".

CloudyBlake

XN-Matt It looks like WHMCS allows you to send out email campaigns based on server.

XN-Matt

WHMCS won't know the actual server being used, it only knows/sees the control panel server.... I suspect the same for other billing engines too, as well as those made in-house.

(It does work for cPanel for example where it connects directly to each end server).

CloudyBlake

XN-Matt True.

I setup a server in WHMCS for each service. For Enhance, I just have one so far, so I can see where this might get tricky if there is more than one Enhance webserver.

XN-Matt

+and just to add on this. For a reseller, the same call would need to collect all potential servers that their sub-accounts as listed on and return in the string. At a basic level, just a list and maybe further expansion would be package + list.

twest

We use BetterStack uptime monitoring, which also has a status page you can setup for customers to see status of all your services you wish to display, it's highly customizable. When doing major updates we'll announce via social media and our status page with as much notice as possible, then another reminder notice 24 hours in advance.

XN-Matt

The problem I’m trying to address is contacting those specific customers directly instead of just post on status pages or alert out to those not affected by planned work or a service issue.

We have status pages and socials but have found that people rarely check these for planned works.

twest

XN-Matt best bet for that is going to be tagging each subscriber in your newsletter services so you can easily send a notif to just those effected clients.

XN-Matt

twest agree but no way to isolate which customers….