How hosting.com standardized incident communication across 32 brands in just a few weeks

When hosting.com brought together dozens of brands under one umbrella, their goal was simple: make communication clear, fast, and consistent. This meant creating one streamlined incident communication process across all brands.

“Everything was all over the place,” recalls Joel Drane, Head of Customer Advocacy.

Each brand had its own way of handling incidents. Some used Atlassian Statuspage, others relied on homegrown tools, while some had no process in place at all. During outages, publishing consistent updates could take more than 10 minutes and required logging into several systems.

The real problem hit when hosting.com consolidated its infrastructure into shared data centers. Now, a single DDoS attack could impact multiple brands simultaneously and the team found themselves logging into different platforms, making status updates for each brand separately.

They needed one place to manage all incident communication with ease.

Finding a partner, not just a platform

When hosting.com evaluated status page providers, they looked at the usual suspects: Atlassian Statuspage, Instatus, and Status.io. They were already using these platforms across different brands, but they needed a single tool.

Sorry™ stood out for reasons beyond features.

"Sorry felt far more personal and approachable," Joel explains. “You guys immediately offered a demo, while other platforms didn’t respond or didn’t feel as aligned with our culture and needs."

Joel went on to say, "You seem to be a customer-focused and customer-forward brand and we really love that."

Rolling out status pages brand by brand

Hosting.com took a staggered approach, onboarding each brand separately rather than attempting a mass migration. For brands previously on Atlassian Statuspage, the process was straightforward. Migrating components and subscribers took just a few minutes per brand.

With branding, customization, and setup included, each page took about 30-40 minutes to get live.

"Branding the page and uploading logos was really easy,” says Joel. "I didn't find myself reaching for guides. It was quite quick and easy to build."

The team created internal step-by-step guides for their 15 global admins and pointed them to Sorry's knowledge base. But the biggest challenge wasn’t technical, it was writing brand-specific notice templates from scratch for each status page.

Within a few weeks, they were up and running with all status pages running on a single platform.

Faster updates, better customer experience

The operational improvements were immediate. Before Sorry™, updating all status pages during a multi-brand incident took 10-15 minutes just to get initial alerts published.

Now, it takes a few minutes per brand, cutting their initial response time by about 75%.

But the benefits go beyond speed.

"When a customer contacts support during an outage, we can direct them to our status page,” says Joel. “They can stay tuned for updates and feel secure knowing we’re working on it behind the scenes."

Real-time embeddable system status badge

The team also integrated the Sorry™ status badges into customer portals across brands, giving customers a visible touchpoint for service health before they reach out to support. For many of the acquired brands, this was the first time they had any incident communication infrastructure at all.

Incident response workflow improvements

The workflow improved internally, too. Infrastructure teams now post alerts to a global Teams channel, and Joel’s Customer Advocacy team translates technical updates into customer-friendly language before publishing. This ensures consistent, clear communication across all brands.

"Previously, it was our infrastructure team posting alerts, and they weren’t always very customer-friendly,” Joel explains. His team is here to communicate with customers in a way that informs them of what's happening.

Expanding beyond outages

For hosting.com, status pages aren’t just for incidents anymore. The team plans to use Sorry™ General Notices to communicate product launches, feature sunsetting announcements, and other important customer updates.

"We wanted to not just talk about outages and maintenance,” says Joel. “We also wanted to talk about product sunsetting, launching new products, or other things we want to communicate to our customers. A status page is a good communication portal for that."

This is something many other status page tools don’t accommodate. They view incident updates and product updates as separate silos. But Sorry™ is different. We believe all customer-impacting updates should be centralized.

Growing subscribers and spreading awareness

The team is also exploring automation to reduce manual work and build up their subscriber base, as many brands are starting from zero since they never had a status page before. This initiative also includes spreading awareness of the status pages so customers visit the page before contacting support.

Up next: Exploring Sorry™ Status Page Collections

One feature Joel is particularly excited about? Sorry™’s Status Page Collections feature, which will allow hosting.com to consolidate all their brand status pages into a single, unified customer experience.

"Hopefully, when we chat in 6 months, we’ll have that nailed down," says Joel.

See how hosting.com keeps customers informed at status.hosting.com.