What is a status page and why have one?
A status page is a public web page that tells your users whether your service is up, which parts are affected during a problem, and when it is expected to be fixed. It replaces a flood of "is it down?" emails and social posts with one link you control.
A good status page does three jobs:
- Answers the immediate question. Visitors see the current state of each component, such as Website, API, Checkout or Email delivery.
- Shows track record. Uptime history for each component builds trust with prospects and reduces pressure during the next incident.
- Communicates during incidents. Short, timestamped updates show that someone is working on the problem.
Uptime Tracker hosts the page for you at uptimetracker.live/status/your-slug, or on your own domain on Starter and Team. Because status pages are served separately from your own infrastructure, they stay reachable when your servers are the thing that is down.
Status pages are useful well beyond SaaS. Online stores link them from their help page, agencies give one to each client, and internal IT teams use private pages for staff. See how SaaS teams and agencies use them.
How components, monitors and incidents fit together
Each status page component is linked to monitors, so the component turns red or green based on confirmed check results rather than manual edits. You decide how to group things: one component per product area is usually clearer for customers than one per server.
For example, an online service might map components like this:
| Component | Monitors behind it |
|---|---|
| Website | HTTPS check on the homepage with a keyword |
| API | API monitor on /health with a JSON assertion |
| Background processing | Heartbeat monitors on queue workers and cron jobs |
| SMTP check on the mail server (Team) |
When a monitor is confirmed down, an incident opens automatically. From the incident view you can acknowledge it, assign it, attach a runbook link, keep internal notes, and post public updates. Public updates appear on the status page in plain text and go to email subscribers; internal notes never leave your workspace. Learn more in incident management.
Scheduled work belongs in a maintenance window. During maintenance, alerts are suppressed and the window is excluded from availability, so a planned database upgrade does not count as downtime. One-off windows are available on every plan; recurring weekly windows require Starter or Team.
The page itself refreshes every minute, so visitors who keep it open see changes without reloading.
Email subscribers and status notifications
Visitors can subscribe to a status page by email and receive incident updates automatically, which keeps customers informed without your support team sending messages by hand. Subscriptions use double opt-in, so only people who confirm their address receive emails, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
Subscriber and email limits scale with your plan:
| Plan | Status pages | Subscribers | Status emails per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | 50 | 500 |
| Starter | 3 | 250 | 2,500 |
| Team | 10 | 2,000 | 20,000 |
Write updates for customers, not engineers. A useful pattern is four short messages per incident:
- Investigating: what users may notice, for example "Some customers cannot log in."
- Identified: what is affected and that a fix is in progress.
- Monitoring: the fix is deployed and you are watching results.
- Resolved: service is back to normal, with a one-line explanation.
Status emails are separate from your team's alert channels. Your engineers get pages through email, SMS, Slack or PagerDuty; your customers get calm, readable updates from the status page. The guides section covers incident communication in more depth.
Custom domains and private status pages
On Starter and Team you can serve a status page on your own domain, such as status.example.com, and Uptime Tracker issues the HTTPS certificate automatically. Setup takes two DNS records:
- Add the custom domain to the status page in Uptime Tracker.
- Create the TXT record shown in the dashboard. It proves you own the domain.
- Create a CNAME record pointing your status subdomain to Uptime Tracker.
- Wait for DNS to propagate. Once verified, the certificate is issued and the page is live over HTTPS.
Use a subdomain of your main domain rather than a subpath on your own servers. If your main site goes down, a page hosted elsewhere and reached through its own DNS record can still load.
Team adds private, password-protected status pages. They are useful when the audience should not be the whole internet: an internal status page for staff, a page for one enterprise customer, or a page that covers systems you do not want to advertise publicly. Agencies often combine private pages with projects so each client sees only their own services.
All status pages show a small "Powered by Uptime Tracker" line. Pages are plain, fast and readable on phones, which matters because most people check a status page from their phone when something is not working.
Create your first status page
Creating a status page takes a few minutes once your monitors exist, and the Free plan includes one page with 50 subscribers.
- Sign in and make sure the services you want to show have monitors. Start with the website monitoring guide if you have none yet.
- Open Status pages, create a page, and choose a slug. The page is immediately available at
uptimetracker.live/status/your-slug. - Add components with customer-friendly names, and link each one to the monitors that represent it.
- Decide whether to accept email subscribers.
- On Starter or Team, connect a custom domain with a TXT and a CNAME record.
- Link the page from your website footer, help center and error pages so customers can find it during an outage.
Keep the component list short. Five to eight components is plenty for most products, and customers should be able to understand each name without knowing your architecture. Test the page on your phone before you share the link, since that is where most visitors will open it during an outage.
What's included on each plan
Every plan includes hosted status pages with live component status, uptime history, incident updates and email subscriptions; paid plans add more pages, custom domains and private pages.
| Free | Starter | Team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status pages | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| Email subscribers | 50 | 250 | 2,000 |
| Status emails per month | 500 | 2,500 | 20,000 |
| Custom domain with automatic HTTPS | No | Yes | Yes |
| Password-protected private pages | No | No | Yes |
| Recurring maintenance windows | No | Yes | Yes |
How to choose: a single product with one audience fits comfortably on Free or Starter. Starter is the usual step up when you want the page on your own domain, because a status. subdomain looks more trustworthy to customers than a shared URL and keeps working links if you ever change tools. Team suits companies that need separate pages per product, region or customer, or an internal page behind a password.
Subscriber limits count confirmed subscribers only, and the monthly email allowance covers every incident update sent to them. If you downgrade, status pages above the new limit are archived rather than deleted, and their data is kept. Compare all limits on the pricing page.
