Private vs Public Status Pages: When and How to Use Them

During IT infrastructure downtime, everyone is in the dark about what is happening: your customer success team, your stakeholders, every other team in the company and most importantly, your customers. The right incident communication flow allows the IT team to keep everyone updated.

An efficient way of communicating is through the use of status pages. However, you cannot effectively communicate with one status page because the type of information you want to pass across to these sets of people is different.

Hence, there is a need for private and public status pages. In this blog post, you will learn about private and public status pages and when and how to use them.

Understanding Public and Private Status Pages

A status page is a communication tool that the IT department of a company uses to communicate with people during downtime when the IT infrastructure is inaccessible on the front end.

When there is downtime, the whole department in the company is affected, especially when most of the sale is done online. Communicating to everyone through the same communication channel is inefficient, hence the use of private and public status pages.

Public Status Pages

A public status page is used to communicate to the public the real-time health status of a company's IT infrastructure, which can be your website, app, API etc. A public status page is accessible to everyone who has the link. The information transmitted via the public status page is not sensitive and communicates the website's current status to the public.

It is advisable to have a custom domain for your public status page to make it easier to find. For example, the domain for the GitHub status page goes thus: GitHub Status, giving it visibility and making it easier to find on the internet when users are searching for it.

Apart from the fact that public status pages give real-time status updates at all times, they help reduce the number of customer queries and support ticket your customer success team has in downtime.

Private Status Pages

Private status pages are restricted to people who have the password for them; hence, access is limited. Private status pages are used to showcase sensitive information to specific company people and maintain privacy within the company. Private pages help the IT department communicate effectively with other departments and avoid being overwhelmed with update requests.

Some status pages are also connected to the team's Slack, Microsoft Teams or other communication channels for notifications and fast responses.

When and How to Use a Public Status Page (Use Cases)

A public status page has three primary use cases:

a. 24/7 Status Update: A public status page is used to publish real-time service status updates on a company's IT infrastructure. Google has indexed the page, and it is available online for all to access at all times.

b. Effective Incident Management: The importance of public status pages becomes obvious in incidents; when the IT infrastructure is inaccessible, and customers want to know what is happening.

For instance, if a downtime occurs for a retail company during a high-traffic sales events, the public status page becomes the go-to in such circumstance, calms customers' minds, and gives them updates until the incident is cleared.

c. Incident Logs and Transparency: The status page is where the company releases incident reports after incidents have been resolved to maintain transparency. This is to build brand trust, maintain complete transparency and reliability with customers.

An excellent example of this is the GitHub status page, as seen below:

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to start using a public status page for your IT infrastructure:

1. Choose an Incident Management Tool: The first step to setting up a status page is to ensure you have an incident management platform that offers a status page as one of the features to avoid subscribing to multiple tools. A perfect example is Pinghome.

Pinghome is a full-stack incident management tool with status pages as one of the features because status pages are a crucial part of incident management. With Pinghome, you can create public and private status pages, customize them with your logo and tailor them to your needs.

2. Pick a Custom Domain: Pick a custom domain for your public status page domain to enable subscribers locate it easily on the web. The best status format to use is status.companyname.com for easy access.

3. Input Your Details: Input your details and follow the prompt. While inputting your details, build it to your specifications using the advanced settings as shown below:

When and How to use a Private Status page (Use Cases)

Here are some of the use cases of private status pages:

1. Maintenance Updates: Private status pages can keep stakeholders updated during IT infrastructure revamps and maintenance to inform them of the project's status.

2. Outage Updates: In downtime, it can also be used to keep stakeholders updated on the repair status more accurately. For instance, in the period of outages, there is already a template of a series of steps. The private status page can update the stakeholders and C-suite on which step they are in the recovery process.

To set up a private status page, follow the same procedure as creating a public status page, but for the setting, you pick a private status page instead. Fill in your details to build it to your specifications, as seen below:

Getting Started with Pinghome

Pinghome is the all-in-one incident management tool you need to manage incidents successfully. Key features include uptime monitoring, server monitoring, public and private status pages and a tech stack of incident management features to help retain customers' trust in downtime.

Discover how Pinghome can help you maintain transparency with tailored status pages - book a demo or a start no-cost trial today.