📒 Introducing Notification Contacts

👋 It's Ryan from the Domain Monitor here and I'm excited to announce a new feature that we've been wanting to add to our website and domain monitoring products for a long time.

A feature that I'm sure you've also been wanting…

Today, we're announcing the introduction of Notification Contacts.

In this short product article, I'm going to tell you more about the introduction of Notification Contacts and how you can get up and running with this feature if you're signed up to our Domain Monitor.

💭 What Are Notification Contacts?

We like to think of Notification Contacts as sort of… team members.

They're the people or departments that you want to notify in your team regarding several events, these might include:

• Domain expiry alerts
• Monitor down alerts
• SSL expiry alerts
• Monitor up alerts

You might have a team of several people, a manager, some developers and maybe a customer service department.

Wouldn't it be nice if they could all receive an email regarding your domain name expiring because maybe you're on holiday, or you're out of office.

Well, now you can!

With Notification Contacts, we're allowing you to add up-to 2 additional people as contacts to your Domain Monitor account, and these individuals don't need to be signed up to our service in order to be added as a contact.

💪 How Do I Get Started With Notification Contacts?

Getting started with Notification Contacts is super simple, and I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do in order to add someone new as a contact to your account.

1. Firstly, make sure that you're signed up to our website monitoring service and that you've verified your account
2. Next, head to your Notification contacts page

As a note, we'll send email alerts to any Notification Contact that you add to our system as long as they're both:

• Enabled
• Verified

If you don't want a Notification Contact to receive alerts, you can either customise the alerts that they receive, disable them or delete them entirely. If you delete a contact and wish to add them back, you'll need to re-verify their email with us.

What Happens After I Add A Contact?

After you've added a new Notification Contact you will need to verify and enable this contact in your account.

We take security and privacy very seriously on our Domain Monitor, and so every Notification Contact that you add is disabled by default and requires verification.

Verifying a contact will require you to send the contact a special verification email, you can do this by clicking on "Verify" from within your Notification Preferences section of your account.

Your contacts will have a period of time to then click on a link within their email to verify, after which you'll be able to enable them as a contact to start receiving alerts.

Managing Notification Types

Each Notification Contact that you add can have individual notification types specified, this means that if you only want a contact to be receiving alerts for when one of your monitor's comes online, then you can.

We thought it would be an important part of this feature, because with little to no customisation over what alerts your contacts receive essentially make them a little redundant, you might as well set up some generic email address with your provider and have your alerts forwarded on to them right?

Disabling Your Contacts

Sometimes you don't want your contacts to receive alerts...

Why?

Well, you might be carrying out DNS maintenance on your domain name, changing web hosting provider or simply rebooting your server, all of these tasks can take time.

This is why we've introduced the ability for you to completely disable alerts for contacts, this will not only save you time, but will also prevent your contacts from getting in touch with you and saying something like...

"John, I just received an alert telling us that our website just went down?"

Yeah, that kind of scenario can be quite annoying if you're already aware of the problem.

Simply turn off your contact from receiving alerts and everything should be golden!

Something's Not Working, Where Can I Get Help?

We understand that there can be issues when a new feature is launched, that's why here at the Domain Monitor, we take releasing features quite seriously, we ensure to test features before we roll them out, but sometimes things can go wrong, or simply might not work as expected for some users.

We've got this covered.

Chances are, if there's a real technical issue with the feature we're likely already aware of it, and are working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can, but in case we miss something, or in case you get stuck with the feature, we're actively working on creating, publishing and updating a series of smaller articles around this feature.

You can find access to these by taking a look at the Notifications section under our help guides section

🔮 What's Next For Notification Contacts?

Right now, our biggest focus is on continuously improving and ironing out any issues that you may have with our domain monitoring and website uptime monitoring products.

This means that big features like this will need to be tried and tested before we move on to the next set of big features, and we need your help with identifying any potential problems.

One of our goals with this feature is to eventually be able to have "Team Members", and we'll likely migrate this feature over to that in the near future and will offer you the ability to have more contacts with subscription based plans to our service.

Hopefully, with the new introduction of this feature, it will provide some greater flexibility to receiving notifications exactly where you need them!