Public vs Private Status Pages: Which One Do You Need?

Most discussions of status pages assume "public" — a URL you can give to users who want to know if your service is working. But status pages can also be internal: a view of your full system health that's too detailed or sensitive to expose publicly, but invaluable for your engineering and support teams during incidents.

The decision between public, private, or both comes down to your audience and what they need to see.

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What a public status page does

A public status page is a trust signal. It's the page you link from your support docs, your app's error pages, and your Twitter bio. When something goes wrong, it's the first place users check — and what they find there shapes how they feel about your product.

A good public status page shows:

• Current status — is everything operational right now?
• Component breakdown — which parts of the system are affected?
• Incident history — what happened in the last 90 days, and was it resolved?
• Uptime track record — an honest percentage that users can see before signing up

What it should not show:

• Internal hostnames, IP addresses, or infrastructure details
• Stack traces or error messages
• Internal tooling monitors (CI, internal APIs, admin panels)
• Anything that could be a security signal to an attacker

The public status page is curated. You choose which monitors appear on it and what they're named. "API Gateway" is appropriate. "prod-api-worker-us-east-1-v3" is not.

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What a private status page does

A private status page is a comprehensive view of your entire infrastructure — visible only to authenticated team members. It's the full picture your on-call engineer needs during an incident, not the filtered public view.

Internal status pages typically show:

• All monitors, including infrastructure-level ones not surfaced publicly
• Response time graphs with high time resolution
• Raw error messages and status codes
• Dependency relationships between services
• Current on-call status and escalation chain

In PingBase, the main dashboard is your internal view — visible only to authenticated team members you've invited. It shows everything. Your public status page, on the other hand, only shows the monitors you've explicitly added to it, with the names and component groupings you've configured.

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Which one do you need?

For most SaaS products: you need a public status page. The private view (your PingBase dashboard) is included by default — it's your starting point. You build the public page by selecting which monitors to show.

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The case for going public even when you don't have to

Many founders delay creating a public status page because they worry it will highlight outages that would otherwise go unnoticed. This is backwards thinking.

Your users notice outages whether you have a status page or not. What the status page changes is how they find out and what they do about it. Without one, they discover the issue themselves, feel confused and frustrated, and fire off a support ticket. With one, they check the page, see you're aware and working on it, and wait.

The status page doesn't create the incident in the user's mind. It just redirects that anxiety into something you control: a place where you set the narrative.

There's also an SEO and trust angle. Showing a 99.9% uptime track record on your status page is a marketing asset. Prospects doing due diligence on your product will check it. An honest uptime history — including incidents that were handled well — communicates maturity.

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Multiple status pages: when one isn't enough

Some products need more than one public status page:

• Platform with multiple independent regions: US and EU customers care about different services. Separate pages let each audience see only what's relevant to them.
• Product suite with separate services: your core app, your analytics product, and your data pipeline can each have a page — so a pipeline incident doesn't scare app users.
• Agencies: each client needs their own page at status.clientdomain.com, seeing only their monitors.
• Enterprise SaaS with per-tenant SLAs: enterprise customers sometimes want their own dedicated status view as part of the contract.

PingBase Business supports multiple status pages per account. Each page is independently configured — different monitors, different branding, different custom domain. The internal dashboard shows everything across all pages in one view.

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Setting up a public status page in PingBase

1. Go to Status Pages in the sidebar and click New page
2. Choose a slug (e.g. your-company → pingba.se/status/your-company)
3. Add monitors to the page — select which ones to show and rename them for a public audience
4. Optionally configure a custom domain (status.yourcompany.com) via CNAME
5. Share the URL in your support docs, error pages, and app footer

The setup takes under 5 minutes. Once it's live, it maintains itself — no manual updates needed unless there's an active incident.