Out with the old [textersrealm.com], In with the new texters-realm.com
Texter’s Realm is a broadcast SMS company that enables hundreds of organizations to reach their audience via SMS. It’s a company that has existed 2 years now since August 2016 and growing strong.
When we first started Texter’s Realm, it was all about speed and getting the product to the market as quickly as possible. We selected a lot of third party providers to enable us get to market fast, and we ended up selecting one provider who turned out not to be as perfect as we would have liked. This is further described below.
Unlike other internet startups, Texter’s Realm is largely dependent on other companies to survive. 80% of Texter’s Realm’s life is dependent on the life of other companies. C’est la vie!
At a high level, Texter’s Realm depends on the following critical services/companies to enable our customers send broadcast SMS messages within Kenya:
- Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom — They provide the mobile network upon which Texter’s Realm sends messages. For without them we are nothing!
- Ramnode — Provide hosting infrastructure upon where we run Texter’s Realm servers.
- Pesapal — Provide the payments platform upon which Texter’s Realm bills customers.
- Google/Bitly — *Provided the link shortening infrastructure that powered the Texter’s Realm links feature.
- Domain hosting — **This used to be an unnamed startup.
There are a lot more dependencies we rely on, but the above are the most critical. If either of the above companies experienced downtime, then Texter’s Realm customers would also experience downtime, even when it was no fault of Texter’s Realm 😦
During our 2 years of operation, each and every one of those 5 companies has had a relatively good up-time except the #5 startup. This was the company hosting textersrealm.com, our generic Top Level domain and gateway to our world class product.
Sometimes customers would try to log in only to find out that our domain was down. This was really bad for our business and had to change!
Key to note as well is that during the 2 years of operation, we tried to quietly move our domain to more robust providers who would guarantee proper up-time of our product. However, our efforts bore no fruits because of the long time the startup took to respond to support requests (sometimes up to a month!). Enough was enough, we were not going to lose our customers due to continued poor quality service that was not of our own.
Today we are officially migrating to texters-realm.com, with the hyphen!
We will be the first to admit that this new domain name is not as catchy as the previous one, but it is more reliable. In our business, reliability is really important. We have partnered with Safaricom Business to make this work. These are the most reliable domain hosting providers in the country and they have a really robust support department including round the clock call center. We believe that their level of commitment to customer service provides the level of trust that we want our customers to experience when using our product. We couldn’t have asked for more.
Going forward customers can expect Texter’s Realm to be available when they want it and when they need it, no down-times no excuses. This will mean that customers delete the old bookmark to our site and replace it with http://texters-realm.com, and it will be worth it!
Stay tuned for the next set of features and products that we will be rolling out due to our more reliable domain.
Notes from this article:
*We will be switching from hosting our links shortening providers with Google/Bitly to an internal solution. Stay tuned for this. Since we have changed domains, the previous links will throw 404 errors. Customers are advised to check their dashboard and re-share the new links (which include a hyphen) with their target audiences.
**Our new domain provider is Safaricom Business!
