public status page
A customer-facing page that shows the live availability of a service, plus the history of past incidents.
A public status page is a web page operated by a service provider to communicate the current operational status of their products to customers. Unlike an internal dashboard, a public status page is intended to be linked from support docs, email footers, and incident communications so that users and stakeholders can self-serve answers to the question “is it down for everyone, or just me?”
A good public status page combines a live availability signal (typically a coloured indicator and uptime percentage) with a chronological feed of incidents — including the start time, current state, and ongoing updates. Many also expose subscription endpoints (RSS, email, webhook) so power users can be notified about ongoing incidents without refreshing.
Operators sometimes confuse public status pages with marketing sites. They’re different: a marketing site lives on your primary domain and is allowed to go down with the rest of your infrastructure. A status page should be hosted independently so it stays up when your primary infrastructure doesn’t.
status page
Any page — public or private — that surfaces the live state of a system. The public variant is the one customers see.
incident
A discrete event during which a service was unavailable or degraded, with a defined start, updates, and resolution.
uptime monitoring
Periodically probing a URL or endpoint from an external location to detect outages and degraded performance.