We wanted to hear how other businesses are using OutagesIO (sister service of ISP Tracker) to monitor their Internet connections, so we reached out to Ray Champagne, Senior IT Director of 411 Locals, a digital advertising agency based in Nevada that started in 2007.
They specialize in local search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and online marketing solutions for small and medium-sized businesses throughout the United States, the Philippines and other areas.
They use data and technology to help over 40,000 customers grow their businesses and stand out on the web. We asked them a few questions to find out more:
How does 411 Locals use OutagesIO to help its business?
“Our business before 2020 had a large and geographically dispersed organization, with limited remote workers at the time,” Champaign said. “When the pandemic hit, like many businesses, we had to quickly shift to a remote-work model, where our employees all worked from their homes.
Of course, this introduced a host of issues for the business, one large one being the ability for employees to do their jobs effectively with unstable home internet connections.”
When 411 Locals contacted OutagesIO to see if the solution would work for them, OutagesIO founder Mike Paradis and his developers spent time with the 411 Locals technical team on Zoom calls to help tweak the product to work best for their unique needs.
“When we discovered OutagesIO,” Champagne said, “we found a reliable way to monitor these connections and offer advice to the employee on how to fix the problem, be it changing their ISP, bringing the outage/instability data to their ISP so they could address the underlying infrastructure, or even moving to a place where better internet was available.”
What makes OutagesIO different from other network monitoring tools?
“We had been looking for quite some time (months) for a solution like OutagesIO without much luck,” Champagne said. “There are a lot of solutions for remote-monitoring whole offices, specific servers, data centers, or other commercial traditional IT services, but not much for single homes/connections.”
Paradis agrees that is one thing that makes OutagesIO unique. “We’ve used many of the big network monitoring tools in previous businesses when we were an ISP and web host provider. We wanted to create a tool that was simple to use and understand,
if you needed to monitor one connection for a home office but just as scalable and useful if you needed to monitor hundreds of connections or even more.”
Champagne adds, “Personally, I liked that Mike and his team were able to work with us to shape the product into exactly what we needed from it. It was not a one-size-fits-all solution, in fact, we worked with their technical team over the course of a few weeks evaluating and iterating to what we use today.
Working with small businesses is what our company does at its heart, so partnering with a small business like OutagesIO just made good sense.”
Which tools do you use most and are there others you’d like to add?
“For us, a stable internet connection is critical for our team to do their job, so we heavily monitor both the ISP speed/latency and outages,” Champagne said. As for additional tools, “it is working very well for us as-is. If there was something, I am 100% sure if we brought the need to Mike and his team, they would try and solve it.”
Connect with 411 Locals:
480-900-8025