Explainer2026-07-24 · 3 min read
How to read a hosting status page
What an incident timeline should tell you, and what it usually leaves out.
A status page has one job: tell affected customers what is happening, in time to be useful. Many of them instead exist to look green.
Signs a status page is honest
- Incidents appear while they are happening, not after they are resolved.
- The scope says which services and locations are affected, not just “some customers”.
- Updates continue at a stated interval even when there is nothing new to report.
- A post-incident summary explains the cause and what changed as a result.
What an uptime percentage does not tell you
A monthly percentage hides the distribution. Ninety-nine point nine percent is about forty-three minutes a month, which is very different depending on whether it was one forty-three minute outage during business hours or a series of short interruptions overnight. Ask for the incident history, not the number.