What Is a Status Page? (And 5 Benefits of Getting One)

If you are a CTO or an indie hacker, you may have heard about how vital a company status page is. But can it increase your engineering productivity, improve customer experience, and make a difference to your bottom line?

And what is it, really?

What is a status page?

In fancy terms, it’s a communication tool that lets you inform users about current outages and scheduled maintenance of your service (usually a website or a web app).

In practice, it’s a page most internet companies have to showcase if there are any problems with their service. See status.stripe.com, status.slack.com, or githubstatus.com (below) for reference.

What are the two status page types

There are two types of status pages: public and private.

Public pages are accessible to everyone with a link. The three examples above are all public pages. These are most suitable for companies with many users or when communicating non-sensitive information.

Private pages are usually not findable via search engines and are either password or IP protected. This way, only specific team members or specific clients can get in.

That’s why they’re often used for team-wide communication. Development, support, c-level, and other teams can have dedicated pages, each with information only relevant to them.

Those pages usually come with the devstatus.companyname.com and similar URL formats.

Who should have a status page

Anyone running an online service could benefit from a status page.

Here are a few examples:

• Freelancers and hobbyists: to have a track record of how their app performs over time. A single place to check everything. Those pages are usually not shared and are only used on the individual level.
• Engineering teams: to have one private board for a high-level overview of their systems. It can be combined with Grafana, Kibana, or Better Stack dashboards. Those usually provide in-depth data (like CPU or errors over time) compared to the status page general overview (like App is up, CDN is up).
• Customer success, support, and sales teams: usually set up together with the engineering team to streamline the communication between the engineering and non-engineering teams. Those pages can be also used for communication with users.
• C-level executive teams: to have a private page with a simplified snapshot of the key business uptime metrics. Mainly related to SLAs (service level agreements) and other KPIs.

5 reasons why you should have a status page

If you see yourself in one of those teams, here is what a status page will do for you.

1. It reduces customer support queries

Sharing the bad news first is hard. But it works.

A public status page lets your customers check for incidents whenever they find something that’s not working correctly for them. This way, they know what’s going on immediately instead of emailing the support team about any minor errors.

Often, not knowing is what angers customers the most. People are usually quite forgiving if you communicate proactively and set the right expectations.

Yes, some will still write emails to support or, worse, go on a Twitter posting spree. But the majority won’t.

2. It automates problem communication

When problems occur, engineering teams are usually the first ones hit with all the questions.

However, engineers are the ones who need to do the majority of the work to fix the problems. They shouldn’t spend time writing 1:1 emails explaining everything to the rest of the company.

What a status page does is that it replaces this 1:1 communication flow with itself as the single, public, and instant source of truth — automating most of the problem communication.

3. It’s the industry standard

Be it status.stripe.com, status.slack.com, or githubstatus.com — any business with an online presence has some form of a status page.

For tech-savvy users, the status.yourdomain.com URL format is widely known and recognized as the first place to check.

Dedicated Twitter accounts for incident communication (like Stripe status) or bulk emails are also common. But nothing beats a simple public page since there are no restrictions on social media accounts or inbox deliverability.

Further reading: 7 status page examples to learn from

4. It builds trust among potential customers

Potential buyers (especially businesses) often choose vendors based on their reliability. Uptime and SLA promises are great, but nothing beats a public performance record.

Status pages allow you to be transparent about your historical uptime. At our status.betterstack.com, everyone can see it for the last 90 days.

Further reading: 4 Copy-Pastable Incident Templates for Status Pages

5. It’s an independent and reliable channel

In cases when your whole infrastructure goes down, it’s best to have an independent channel that you can use to communicate with customers.

For example, GitHub has a dedicated domain: githubstatus.com, where the status page and all the incident communication live.

That’s no coincidence. Thanks to this setup, if anything is wrong with the main site, the status site remains independent and working.

Having either a completely dedicated domain or at least a subdomain hosted somewhere else (like at Better Stack) is the best way to stay safe.

Learn more

Convinced that you should have a status page?

Then you have two options:

• Go read more about best practices and how to get started in our next article: Why Are Status Pages Important: 5 Reasons (And How to Get Started)
• Or create a status page by yourself for free right now: Signup for Better Stack (takes about 3 minutes)

Looking to learn more about incident management? Check out these guides:

• Best free status page tools
• What Is Incident Management? Beginner’s Guide
• How to Create a Developer-Friendly On-Call Schedule in 7 steps

Any questions or comments? Let us know at hello@betterstack.com.

If you’re considering getting a status page, you can book a free consultancy call with us.

Article by

Jenda Tovarys

Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.

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