For anyone looking to switch from Airbrake/Exceptional to a more modern/reliable error tracking product, check out our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com).
James from Bugsnag here. We make sure to reply to people asap, we've set up Help Scout (https://www.helpscout.net) to manage the replies to these emails, so even if I'm out of the office, my co-founder can jump on and reply.
Our target is to reply within 10 minutes, unless we are asleep :)
James, you're doing much better than me! I've been slipping on my reply times recently to up to 2 days which totally sucks.
One thing I started doing is taking an hour of zero-distraction time every morning to fire off responses to emails that come in to support.
Unfortunately we don't have anyone handling customer responses full time, but we're getting to where we should. Responses to emails are a blessing and a curse, but I wouldn't trade em for the world.
Ian from Segment.io here and +1, we've also just started using HelpScout to handle having lots of messages going to all four of us. It was the nicest solution we found for keeping the personal touch still, since they don't add weird support crap to your emails.
Also the graphs for response time as fun to monitor. Accidentally let one request go over night the other day and really messed up my average ;p
For those asking "why is HipChat better than X", one of the big reasons lies with the number of integrations with other products.
Our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com) has HipChat integration, so you can instantly see errors from your apps appear in your chat room. We've also set up curl scripts to post into chat whenever there is a deploy, or push to GitHub.
I completely agree with this. We (bugsnag) are running on rails 4 beta right now to help iron out any production issues before that is released.
We didn't, however, realize that "patch" releases also have release candidates. I'd recommend following the rails blog (http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/) which announces release candidate builds too.
Complete agree, also the idea of self hosting content in order to save a few $ is really not something we can ever expect - nor should we ask for it IMO.
One of the best features of the app store is that from the consumers perspective its smooth, reliable and just works. Having lots of "cheap" app developers trying to save $100 / yr by hosting their app bin's themselves could results in an unreliable market place that ultimately drives people away from it.
Huge congrats to the Crittercism team. My company Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com) also provides error monitoring for mobile apps, but it is interesting to see Crittercism's shift in focus towards performance monitoring.
My startup NameTerrific can support instantaneous DNS updates in a geo-redundant Anycast infrastructure. As long as your TTL is sufficiently low (<300), the impact is quite limited as propagation time is negligible at NameTerrific.
EDIT: Sorry guys. We got some issues with a gem after installing the recently updated ruby2.0.0p0. The unicorn workers were timing out. TerrificDNS is completely unaffected and the site is already running again.
Well, we have already soft launched our own TerrificDNS Anycast and it has replaced the Route 53 solution. TerrificDNS platform is running on Redis + PowerDNS.
For anyone looking to switch from Airbrake/Exceptional to a more modern/reliable error tracking product, check out our product Bugsnag (https://bugsnag.com).