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Sendgrid is down

support.sendgrid.com

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Re: Sendgrid is down

#11

Post by rdl »

adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

Yeah -- outage notifications to a service's users should go out, rather than just being pulled.

Also seems like best practice would be to have SPF/etc. entries in place for multiple ESPs, even if you routinely just use one, and be able to switch, for just this reason.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#12

Post by mryan »

adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

They've been tweeting about it for an hour or so: https://twitter.com/SendGrid

I would expect them to send emails to customers in the event of serious issues though, expecting your customers to learn about problems through Twitter isn't that much better than learning about them from HN.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#13

Post by whaevr »

adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

Aaand the PR slide for SendGrid continues. Perfectly valid point though.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#14

Post by nwh »

mryan wrote: post #12
adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

They've been tweeting about it for an hour or so: https://twitter.com/SendGrid I would expect them to send emails to customers in the event of serious issues though, expecting your customers to learn about problems through Twitter isn't that much better than learning about them from HN.

> I would expect them to send emails

Re: Sendgrid is down

#15

Post by jneal »

As a SendGrid customer, I'm certainly glad I visit HN frequently and was able to find out about this. I'm surprised we weren't notified by them directly, though.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#16

Post by pytrin »

nwh wrote: post #14
mryan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been tweeting about it for an hour or so: https://twitter.com/SendGrid I would expect them to send emails to customers in the event of serious issues though, expecting your customers to learn about problems through Twitter isn't that much better than learning about them from HN.

> I would expect them to send emails

Preferably not with their own SMTP service ;)

Re: Sendgrid is down

#17

Post by markeganfuller »

jneal wrote: post #15

As a SendGrid customer, I'm certainly glad I visit HN frequently and was able to find out about this. I'm surprised we weren't notified by them directly, though.

We've never been directly notified by them despite their SMTP breaking a number of times.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#18

Post by adambenayoun »

rdl wrote: post #11
adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

Yeah -- outage notifications to a service's users should go out, rather than just being pulled. Also seems like best practice would be to have SPF/etc. entries in place for multiple ESPs, even if you routinely just use one, and be able to switch, for just this reason.

We do have SPF entries set up for another provider, the main problem is that some services may need to warm up an IP prior sending lot of emails through a backup provider.

What it means is that basically you should be using 2 providers at the same time and send 50%/50% on each provider in order to keep your IP warms.

While I think big services should account for such scenario, I think 95% of Sendgrid customers are using them to avoid setting up that kind of redundancy.

Main question is should I create the same redundancy for my hosting provider, DNS services, CDN etc...

Re: Sendgrid is down

#19

Post by adambenayoun »

mryan wrote: post #12
adambenayoun wrote: post #8

Sendgrid customer here. Since many services rely on SMTP providers like Sendgrid, they should have a way to notify customers when their server go down and transactional notifications may be disrupted. I shouldn't be notified by someone who know we're using Sendgrid and happen to read HN.

They've been tweeting about it for an hour or so: https://twitter.com/SendGrid I would expect them to send emails to customers in the event of serious issues though, expecting your customers to learn about problems through Twitter isn't that much better than learning about them from HN.

Critical notification should be sent to me and not pulled by me. Nice addition would be to have an addon to newrelic that would basically poll services/API like sendgrid and allow you to setup notifications for failure or degradation.

Re: Sendgrid is down

#20

Post by efa »

slig wrote: post #7

Even though I'm a SG customer, I can't help but feel a little schadenfreude. edit: when I made this comment I thought this was a random service failure that would last couple of minutes. More than 1 hour later, I don't think it's that funny anymore as I'm being affected as well.

SG customer as well. What's all the negativity towards them? Is there something I should know about them? I wasn't aware of any incidents.
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