Guides 5 min read
How to Create a Status Page Customers Trust
A status page tells customers what is broken, what you are doing and when to check back. How to set one up, what to put on it and ready-to-use incident update templates.
ReadGlossary · Incidents and alerting
What is a status page?
A status page is a public web page that shows whether a service and its components are working, with current incidents, planned maintenance and recent history, so users can check for themselves instead of asking support.
How it works and why it matters
Status pages answer the first question in any outage, “is it just me?”, and cut support load when it is highest. Components such as website, API, checkout and email let users see what is affected; status updates say in plain words what is known and when the next update comes.
A status page should run on separate infrastructure from the service it reports on, so it stays up during the outage it describes. Status that comes from monitoring keeps it right when nobody has time to update it by hand.
Subscriptions by email, chat or webhook bring updates to people instead of making them reload the page, and announcing a maintenance window there in advance avoids surprises.
How Uptimecheck helps
Uptimecheck status pages update themselves from your monitors, with 90 days of history per component, status updates in your own words, planned maintenance and incident reviews, in the visitor’s time zone and one of 9 languages. Visitors can subscribe by email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord or webhook. A page can be password protected and carries your logo and colours.
14-day free trial · No credit card required
Read more in the guides
Guides 5 min read
Incident Communication: A Plan and Templates for Every Stage
How to tell customers about an outage: who speaks, how often, on which channel and in what words. A one-page plan, severity levels, update cadence and ready-to-use templates for status pages, email and social media.
ReadQuestions
Should a status page be public or private?
Public for customer-facing services, so anyone can check. Password protected for internal tools or a page made for a single client.
Should a status page update automatically?
Component status, yes: from monitoring it is right at 3 a.m. too. Incident text, no: write it yourself, since only people know the impact and what is being done.
What should a status update say?
What is affected, what users may notice, what you are doing and when the next update will come. Leave out guesses about the cause until you know.
More from Incidents and alerting
All terms-
On-call
A named person responsible for responding to alerts, in rotation. Read the definition : On-call -
Escalation policy
Who gets alerted next, and when, if nobody responds. Read the definition : Escalation policy -
Alert fatigue
Too many alerts, so the important ones get ignored. Read the definition : Alert fatigue
Downtime is obsolete.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
14-day free trial · No credit card required