How to Set Up a Public Status Page for Your Service

When your service goes down, the first thing users do is check if it's just them. If you don't give them somewhere to look, they'll flood your inbox, tweet about it, or worse — assume it's always this unreliable and leave.

A status page fixes this. It's a simple public page showing the current health of your services, and it's one of the highest-trust signals you can provide.

Why status pages matter

They reduce support tickets during outages. Instead of 50 users emailing "is it down?", they check the status page and see you're already on it.

They build transparency. A status page says "we take uptime seriously and we're not hiding anything." Users respect this.

They show historical uptime. A 99.9% uptime badge earns trust with potential customers evaluating your product.

They set expectations during maintenance. Scheduled maintenance windows displayed on your status page prevent surprise-downtime complaints.

What to include on your status page

A good status page has:

• Current status for each service — API, website, dashboard, background jobs. Break them out so users can see exactly what's affected.
• Uptime history — 30, 60, or 90 days of uptime bars showing reliability over time.
• Response time graphs — so users can see if things are slow, not just down.
• Incident history — past incidents with timestamps and resolution notes.
• Clear incident history — past incidents with timestamps and resolution notes so visitors can see how you handled previous issues.

Status page mistakes to avoid

Don't hide it when things go wrong. Some teams only update their status page when everything is fine. That defeats the purpose. If the page doesn't reflect a current outage, users will never trust it again.

Don't make it too granular. Users don't need to know about every internal microservice. Group things into user-facing categories: "Website," "API," "Dashboard."

Don't require a login. The status page should be publicly accessible. If your auth system is down, a login-gated status page is useless.

Don't forget mobile. Many users will check your status page from their phone. Make sure it's responsive.

Self-hosted vs. managed status pages

You can build your own status page or use a managed solution:

Self-hosted gives you full control but means more maintenance. You need to keep it running (ironic if it goes down when your main service does) and build the subscriber notification system yourself.

Managed status pages from your monitoring provider are the simplest option. They're automatically updated based on your monitors — when a check fails across multiple regions, the status page reflects it without manual intervention. They stay up even when your infrastructure doesn't.

Setting up a status page in PoppaPing

If you're using PoppaPing, status pages are built in:

1. Go to Status Pages in your dashboard
2. Click Create Status Page and choose a subdomain (e.g., status.yourcompany.com)
3. Add the monitors you want to display
4. Customize the branding — logo, colors, custom domain

The page updates automatically based on your monitor health. No manual toggling required.

You can also point your own domain at the status page with a CNAME record, so it looks like status.yourcompany.com rather than a third-party URL.

The bottom line

A status page takes 5 minutes to set up and saves hours of support work during every incident. More importantly, it signals to your users that you're professional, transparent, and on top of things.

If you're running any kind of SaaS, API, or web service — you should have one.