Over the years here at Statuspage we’ve probably heard every version of the open source vs. paid status page argument. While we’re obviously fans of the SaaS model, we also know there are a lot of advantages to an open source status page for a lot of teams. We’ve even recommended that route to some potential customers we thought would have a better experience hosting their own open source page.

Nothing puts a drag on IT service teams and customer support teams like answering the same question across multiple tickets. Outages and incidents have a way of sending these teams an avalanche of duplicate tickets. During a service interruption, tickets start flying in, the team can’t keep up, and end users have a bad experience made even worse.

The unfortunate reality about running a web service is that every now and again, you’re going to have downtime. Even the best web companies have the occasional blip in service. If downtime is inevitable, then it’s best to plan ahead so that you can be ready. After all, prior preparation prevents poor performance.

Uptime Status Pages can now be shared publicly. You will find that they are a useful tool for information sharing under a variety of circumstances. Internal pages offer excellent insight for your team, but public status pages provide users and other parties helpful information about your services and websites.

The goal of a planned maintenance announcement should be to get the right people informed and confident about the upcoming maintenance. Here’s our guide to announcing scheduled maintenance, along with some examples from our friends who are doing it well.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.

As one of the most requested features we are happy to officially introduce the Uptime and Response time graphs. Setting up an uptime graph requires zero configuration, it’ll be added automatically to your status page (for startup & business subscribers) and you can choose to hide it in the design page of your admin panel.

The Incident and Component status workflows are now unified in Statuspage, meaning easier incident communication and fewer steps to get status updates to the right people.

v0.6.2 is released! Need HTTP endpoint monitoring? The new guide by @wmnnd describes how to set up serverless HTTP(S) monitoring!

Whether there’s a crisis or scheduled maintenance on your servers, you need to keep your customers informed during these down times. Instead of using multiple tools in your crisis management process, your IT team can use one platform. Status pages can solve multiple issues in one location instead of using your web page, email, phone and ticket system to notify customers. This also helps to let them know about maintenance updates before they happen.