Pingometer Keeps Your Uptime In The 9’s With Twilio SMS

Pingometer Keeps Your Uptime In The 9’s With Twilio SMS

In a perfect world, no website would go down. In the real world, government websites go down in the middle of a press event in a senator’s office in front of 60 high ranking officials. That’s why Pingometer exists, to exterminate downtime and maximize uptime.

“By nature of the product, it’s always 911 when we are sending alerts,” says Tyler Scott, Founder of Pingometer. It’s the nature of downtime – it’s always an emergency. Pingometer uses Twilio SMS to send downtime alerts that cut through saturated email inboxes, to make sure that the stakeholders know when their website is down.

The Email’s Marked As Urgent, But Is It Really?

Any email can be marked as urgent by anyone, anytime. This creates what we’ll call shades of email urgency. The incident alert email deserves being flagged as urgent, but the broken coffee maker email might not. They’re both equally urgent as far as your inbox is concerned.

SMS as a medium carries a sense of urgency in itself. It’s direct, personal, and has an incredibly high open rate for those reasons. Pingometer relies on that sense of urgency.

A majority of Pingometer’s clients are in the political realm. These state officials, governors, and representatives get hundreds and hundreds of emails per day. Sifting through their inbox to look for an email alert about downtime is not at the top of their To-Do list.

Getting Stakeholders’ Attention Via SMS In Time-Sensitive Crises

“SMS and Voice alerts are so valuable because they’re attended to immediately. That’s not the case with email.” says Tyler. “It’s bad for campaigns, it’s bad for everybody when sites go down.” Pingometer monitors your website and programmatically detects downtime to shoot you a note via SMS, Twitter DM, or email whenever there’s an issue.

Pingometer doesn’t just tell you your website is down, it provides you the information you need to make sure your site doesn’t go down again. In each report, Pingometer gives you historical uptime, geography info, status codes and traceroutes.

As much as Tyler and the Pingometer crew work to help their clients maximize uptime and make downtime a thing of the past, incidents still happen. In one month, Pingometer sent out 1,000 SMS alerts, and made 1,600 calls via Twilio Voice to notify their clients of downtime. While they can’t bank on their clients’ downtime disappearing anytime soon, Pingometer’s clients can bank on Pingometer’s alerts. “We haven’t had a single issue, complaint or issue with deliverability. You set up once and it just works,” concludes Tyler.