MailChimp is constantly growing and adding new customers around the world. Currently, we manage a hundred servers and employ CDNs and Akamai Web Application Accelerator to keep things running smoothly and quickly.

Sometimes though we still see things like:

Which can be frustrating for us too. While our infrastructure is rock-solid and we are rarely down, sometimes users experience issues connecting to one of our many servers (often, the user is on  a wifi hotspot that doesn’t like a CDN somewhere). And these days, when people have issues, they tweet something like, “Hey @mailchimpstatus, are you down?” The answer is more complex than “yes” or “no.” And we think it needs more explanation than those green or red “this server is alive” icons.

To help troubleshoot these situations, we just launched the MailChimp Status Page:

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Out with the old

In preparing for MailChimp’s recent redesign, we wanted to change the way we manage the site and its content. MailChimp is growing fast, and that was becoming all too obvious behind the scenes of our website. Our creative department moves quickly, and the tools that were supposed to help us were actually slowing us down. We wanted a system that would be modular, scalable and—most importantly—fast. Here’s how we did it.

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