Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
1. Decide who it is for
A public page for all customers shows the services they use, in their language. An internal page for staff can show more detail. A page for one large customer can be password-protected. Many teams need more than one.
2. Choose what to show
- List services as customers see them: "Website", "Web app", "API", "Payments". Not
prod-web-2. - Group them into a few sections, such as Platform and Integrations.
- Show each service's current state and recent history. Ninety days of daily bars is a common format.
- Hide internal URLs and hostnames if they reveal anything you would rather keep private.
3. Connect it to real monitoring
A status page updated by hand is out of date exactly when it matters: during the outage, when everyone is busy fixing. Build it from your monitors, so the state changes on its own and you only write the explanation.
4. Put it on your own domain
Use a subdomain such as status.yourcompany.com, hosted separately from your main infrastructure, so it stays up when your product does not. Customers trust the address, and you can print it in docs and error messages. The custom domain guide shows the DNS record.
5. Write updates people can use
- Acknowledge quickly. "We are investigating errors on the API" within minutes beats a perfect message an hour later.
- Say what users notice, not your internals: "Payments fail at checkout", not "Database primary failover".
- Give the next update time and keep it.
- Close it properly: what happened, how long it lasted, what you changed.
6. Let people subscribe
Email subscriptions turn the page from something people check into something that tells them. See subscribers.
7. Announce maintenance ahead
Planned work belongs on the page days in advance, so customers can plan around it. Scheduled maintenance windows do this and keep the time out of your uptime figures.
8. Be honest about short outages
Listing every 40-second blip buries what matters; hiding them erodes trust. Upcertain folds brief outages into one line a day and still counts them in uptime. The reasoning is in brief outages on status pages.
Building it in Upcertain
Create a status page from your monitors, pick the sections and public names, upload a logo and choose light or dark. Pages can be public, password-protected or private. See status pages and Upcertain's own status page for an example.