Investing in a rock-solid experience

As we wind down August and look to the final months of the year, we want to give you insight into our preparations for the mission-critical times that lay ahead. Throughout this year, we have continued to invest in our technology and the people powering Sailthru to further deliver a reliable and market-leading experience. Below is an update on those investments, and a brief look at our 2020 code freeze plans. We’ve nearly doubled the headcount across our Engineering and Operations teams

• 3 new members were added to the Site Reliability team to provide 24/7 system monitoring and proactively respond to cautionary alerts before they become workflow-blocking issues
• Our Operations team joined forces with colleagues across our fellow CM Group brands, combining resources and decades of knowledge across 7 business units
• Growing this team also allows us to expedite migration to more cloud-based services and fortify our existing data backup processes

We’ve improved processes to mitigate and communicate incidents

• Incident simulations of varying sizes and causes give our team experience responding and speeds up our resolution time.
• Improved transparency around maintenance–both scheduled and unplanned–via our new public system status page with updated SMS-based alerts, as well as refined internal and external communications
• Be sure you’re subscribed to get these alerts at status.sailthru.com

We’ve invested in more robust cloud backup systems and technology

• More frequent data snapshots to allow for easier restoration and failover if primary data storage experiences issues.
• Two of our most active on-site features–pageview tracking and personalization–are now running in Amazon Web Services to more efficiently handle demand when our customers are sending their highest volume.
• Throughout all of this, we continue to engage a best-in-class cloud migration firm to work with our teams in planning and rolling out existing Sailthru infrastructure services to new homes in AWS.

For those of you with deeper inquiries on these infrastructure and process advancements, our VP of Engineering, George Liao, will be available to join existing or ad hoc conversations. Please let your Customer Success Manager know if this applies to you.

Sailthru Code Freeze 

In keeping with years past, we’re activating our holiday code freeze from October 30, 2020, through January 3, 2021. You may notice this is going into effect earlier than previous years: we’re extending the code freeze to handle increased news coverage during the 2020 U.S. General Election, which then leads into the holiday season.  SIGN UP NOW Head to status.sailthru.com to sign up for real-time email and SMS alerts on Sailthru status updates, platform uptime, and resolution updates. To sign up, click Subscribe to Sailthru in the top right corner, choose “All Components” from the drop-down, and add your email and/or phone number to receive updates.

What’s next?

During the next couple months, we’ll reach out to you about these end-of-year preparations two more times. In September, we’ll highlight our key sensitivity dates for on-call staffing, and provide a reminder of best practices as you begin your election and/or holiday strategy execution.  Then, in late October, we’ll send a final reminder of the code freeze dates, and key Sailthru staff contact information. In addition to these emails, we’ve launched a 2020 Holiday Hub on getstartedstg.wpenginepowered.com to make it easy to find important dates, code freeze-related content and best practices, quick links to the Status page, and more. In the meantime, please stay safe and healthy. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me, your CSM, or the Sailthru support team with any questions.