I’ve always been a strong believer that we should “eat our own dogfood”.
If we’re going to sell a service to our customers then we should try and use it ourselves. Sure, not all services we sell to our customers are going to be appropriate for our own use, but when it comes to things like domain names, we definitely need them ourselves.
So when the .tech domain name extension was announced a few months ago I thought it would be cool to find a good use for one.
And our offsite status site was a prime candidate! As a lot of people know, we post server and service status updates on an offsite site. It’s not our network and doesn’t even use our DNS, so unless there is some kind of global issue it should be reachable even if our own data centres aren’t.
For years we’d been using the rather cumbersome, though fairly obvious, blacknightstatus.com. But switching to Blacknight.tech just makes sense!
It also gave us the chance to switch a few other things around:
- the server / service status is now on a separate subdomain: status.blacknight.tech
- you can subscribe for updates via email, Twitter or RSS
- it’s now using WordPress in common with a lot of our sites
- since it’s using WordPress we were able to tweak how the individual posts appear and will be iterating based on feedback from both staff and clients
From my perspective it’s an important aspect of our overall branding to be able to adopt and use service and audience appropriate domain names
- All our press releases and media mentions can be found at Blacknight.press
- Want our videos? They’re all over on Blacknight.video (currently our YouTube channel)
- We are a hosting company, so my business cards (and some t-shirts) proudly advertise Blacknight.host