What is a status page? A plain-English guide
What a status page is, why teams use one, and how it cuts support load during outages — plus how to create a status page for your own services in minutes.
A status page is a public web page that shows whether your service is up, degraded, or down — in real time, with a history of past incidents. When something breaks, it's the one link you send instead of answering the same "is it down?" question a hundred times. This guide explains what a status page is, why teams use one, and how to set one up.
What is a status page, exactly?
A status page is a simple, public dashboard for your service's health. At a glance, a visitor can see:
- Current status — is everything operational, or is something degraded or down?
- Individual components — API, website, database, dashboard, each with its own status.
- Uptime history — how reliable each component has been over recent days or weeks.
- Incidents and maintenance — what's happening now, what happened before, and what's scheduled.
It answers one question for your users without them having to ask: "Is it you, or is it me?"
Why do teams use a status page?
A status page pays for itself the first time something goes wrong.
During an outage, one public page absorbs the flood of "is it down?" messages so your team can focus on fixing the problem instead of answering it.
Owning your status openly — including the bad days — builds more trust than silence. Users forgive outages; they don't forgive being kept in the dark.
Instead of scattered tweets and Slack messages, everyone — customers, support, stakeholders — reads the same live page.
Uptime history and a resolved-incident timeline are evidence you can point sales, customers and auditors to.
Public vs. internal status pages
Not every status page is for the whole internet.
- Public — for customers. Lives on your own custom domain
(like
status.yourcompany.com) with your logo and colors. - Private / password-protected — for a specific audience: an internal team, a single client, or a beta group. Servor lets you make a status page private so only people with the password can see it.
How a status page works in Servor
The important part: in Servor, a status page isn't something you update by hand every time. You connect it to your monitors, and it keeps itself current.
Create the page
Add your branding — logo and color — and give it a title. See Create a status page for the full walkthrough. Create a status page in Servor
Add components linked to monitors
Each component (API, website, database…) links to a monitor. When the monitor's status changes, the component updates automatically — no manual editing during an outage.
Put it on your domain
Point a CNAME to Servor and serve the page at your own address. See Custom domain for the setup and the common gotcha.
Let people subscribe
Subscribers get email or webhook updates when status changes, so you don't have to broadcast manually.
Automatic components beat manual ones
A status page you have to remember to update during a crisis is a status page that stays wrong at the worst moment. Linking components to monitors means the page tells the truth even when your team is busy firefighting.
Status pages and incidents
Status is the now; incidents are the story. When something breaks, you can open an incident — or let one open automatically from a monitor going down, via automatic incidents. From there you post updates and resolve it, and the whole timeline shows publicly on the page while subscribers get notified.
You can also schedule maintenance in advance, so planned work doesn't look like an outage.
Cloudflare users: turn off the orange cloud
If you put your status page on a custom domain behind Cloudflare, set the DNS record to DNS-only (grey cloud), not proxied (orange cloud). The proxy breaks certificate issuance and serving. See Custom domain for details.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a status page and monitoring?
Monitoring is how you find out something is wrong — it runs checks and alerts your team. A status page is how your users find out — it publishes that status openly. In Servor they're connected: monitors drive the components on your page.
Do I have to update my status page manually?
No. When you link components to monitors, status updates on its own. You only write manually for incident messages and scheduled maintenance — the human context around an event.
Can I put a status page on my own domain?
Yes. Point a CNAME at Servor's target and serve it at something like
status.yourcompany.com. See Custom domain.
Can I keep a status page private?
Yes — you can password-protect it so it's visible only to people with the password, which is ideal for internal or single-client pages.
Can I show status somewhere other than the status page?
Yes. Embed a status badge — a small SVG showing current status — in a README, docs site or footer, linking back to the full page.