Why should my game have a public status page?

During an outage, thousands of players want to know if it's their internet or your servers. Without a status page, every single one of them contacts support or floods Discord. A public page answers the question in 2 seconds and reduces support load by 80% during incidents.

Should I use a hosted service or self-host a status page?

Hosted services like StatusPage, Instatus, or Uptime Kuma's cloud tier are worth it for the email and SMS subscriber features alone. Self-hosting costs time you should be spending on the game. Budget $50-200/month for a hosted status page.

What should and shouldn't appear on a public status page?

Include: per-service health (login, matchmaking, saves, store), current incidents with timeline, and historical incident posts. Exclude: internal infrastructure names, specific server IPs, exact player counts. The page is for players, not for attackers who'd use internal details.

How to Build a Public Status Page for Your Game

Quick answer: A status page answers “is it me or them” for every player within seconds of an outage. Use a hosted service (StatusPage, Instatus, BetterStack), group services by player-visible function, wire incident automation to internal monitors, and expose RSS for subscribers.

A login server goes down at 7 PM. Within 15 minutes, your support Discord has 500 messages, your email inbox has 200 tickets, and your Twitter mentions are unreadable. Every single player is asking the same question: “is it me?” A status page answers that question for everyone at once and stops the flood.

What to Put on the Page

Service list (player-facing names). Group your infrastructure by what players actually notice:

Login & Authentication
Matchmaking
Cloud Saves
Storefront / DLC
Dedicated Servers (by region if relevant)
Leaderboards & Achievements

Each service has a status: Operational, Degraded, Partial Outage, Major Outage. Players understand these words; they don’t need to know your Redis cluster’s name.

Current incidents. Any active issue with a timeline (detected, investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved) and short updates every 15–30 minutes.

Incident history. Resolved incidents stay visible for 90 days. Patterns in history (repeated logins outages) tell the community you’re working on root causes.

What to Leave Off

Internal infrastructure names.
Specific server IPs or cluster sizes.
Exact concurrent player counts.
Vendor identification (“AWS us-east-1 outage” vs “investigating network issues”).

Attackers read status pages too. Vague is fine; actionable internal detail is not.

Automation

Wire internal monitoring (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus) to post to the status page automatically when an alert fires. Keep a human-in-the-loop approval for the first post so noisy monitor alerts don’t auto-publish. Subsequent updates during the same incident can be auto-appended.

Subscriber Features

Offer email, SMS, and RSS subscription. Players who care about uptime will subscribe and never contact support during outages — they already know.

RSS is especially valuable because it’s free for you and well-tolerated by power users. A 100-character incident RSS entry keeps the Discord community informed without them needing to open the website.

Pick a Hosted Service

Self-hosting a status page defeats its purpose — if your infrastructure goes down, so does the page. Hosted options:

Atlassian StatusPage: expensive but the gold standard.
Instatus: cheaper, plenty of features.
BetterStack: uptime monitoring + status page in one.
Uptime Kuma Cloud: open-source roots, cloud tier.

$50–$200/month for a game studio. The support load it saves during one outage pays for itself for a year.

“A status page is the cheapest support multiplier you can buy. The only thing more valuable during an outage is a hotfix.”

Related Issues

For broader incident response, see how to set up incident command for game outages. For live ops runbooks, see how to build a live ops runbook.

Link the status page from every in-game error dialog. A player hitting “cannot connect to server” should be one tap away from seeing that matchmaking is down.