Does My Site Need a Status Page?
A
If anyone other than you depends on your site working — customers, teammates, or another company's app integrating with yours — a status page is worth having. It replaces confused support tickets during an incident with one place people already know to check.
When you need one
Any product with paying customers benefits, because outages generate support load exactly when your team is busiest fixing the actual problem — a status page absorbs that. Anything with an API other developers integrate against benefits even more, since those developers can't just "wait and see," they need to know whether to route around you.
Internal tools a team depends on daily also benefit from a lightweight status page, even without external customers — it saves the "is the tool down or is it just me" Slack messages that otherwise interrupt whoever's closest to fixing it.
When it's genuinely optional
A personal blog, a portfolio site, or anything with no one actively depending on real-time availability doesn't need one — there's no one to communicate with during downtime beyond you noticing it yourself. In that case, a plain uptime check that alerts you directly covers what you actually need.
What it costs you not to have one
Without a status page, every outage produces a second problem on top of the first: customers asking each other and asking you whether it's a real outage, whether it's just them, and when it'll be fixed — all while your team is trying to actually fix it. A status page doesn't prevent the outage, but it removes that second layer of noise.
Does a small side project need a status page?
Only if someone besides you depends on it — paying users, an API integrator, or a teammate. If it's purely personal, a direct alert to you is enough.
What's the benefit of a status page over just fixing the outage quietly?
It stops customers from independently discovering the outage and flooding support with "is this down?" messages right when your team is busiest — one page answers the question for everyone at once.
Should a status page be updated manually or automatically?
Automatically, driven by the same monitors checking your site. A manually updated page depends on someone remembering to change it during an incident, which is exactly when it's least likely to happen.
Does an internal tool need a public status page?
It doesn't need to be public, but a status page — even one shared only with your team — still saves the "is it down or is it me" messages during an incident.
Holter watches this for you: outside-in monitors plus dead-man heartbeats for silent failures. Free plan: 5 monitors, 5-minute checks, no credit card.
Create a status page — free