Set Up Your Own Status Page with Uptime Kuma for Reliable Uptime Monitoring

Monitoring whether your website, API or store is really online is only half of the story. When something goes wrong, customers want a clear, always-available source of truth: a status page that shows current uptime, incident details and maintenance plans. In many teams this starts as a simple question in a planning or architecture meeting: “Where will we show outages and maintenance so everyone sees the same information?” In this article we will walk through how to answer that question by deploying your own status page with Uptime Kuma and combining it with solid uptime monitoring and communication practices. We will focus on practical, self-hosted setups you can run on a VPS, dedicated server or colocation machine at dchost.com, so you fully control your data, branding and notifications.

Why a Dedicated Status Page Matters More Than an Error Message

Many site owners assume a simple error message or maintenance page is enough. In reality, customers and internal teams need three things during any incident: visibility, consistency and history.

• Visibility: A public URL where anyone can instantly see if the service is healthy or degraded.
• Consistency: One authoritative place that matches what your monitoring tools are seeing.
• History: A timeline of past incidents and uptime that builds long-term trust.

If you already care about uptime and SLAs, you have probably read explanations of concepts like error budgets and “three nines”. Our own article on what uptime means and how to ensure continuous availability explains these fundamentals from a hosting perspective. A status page is the user-facing extension of that work: instead of only your technical team seeing graphs and alerts, you publish an understandable view for customers, colleagues, support and management.

Self-hosting a status page with tools like Uptime Kuma lets you keep costs predictable, customize the design, integrate tightly with your own infrastructure and avoid being dependent on a single third‑party SaaS dashboard.

The Building Blocks of an Uptime & Status Stack

Before choosing tools, it helps to map the components of an observability and communication stack. At a minimum you need:

• Probes / Monitors: Periodic checks that test endpoints (HTTP, HTTPS, TCP ports, ICMP ping, DNS, etc.).
• Alerting: Rules that turn monitor failures into notifications via email, chat, SMS or webhooks.
• Status page: A human-friendly dashboard that shows component health, incidents and scheduled maintenance.
• Incident workflow: A simple process for declaring incidents, posting updates and closing them after resolution.
• Post‑incident history: A log of past events, ideally with metrics like uptime percentage per component.

In a small business, you might start with basic HTTP checks and email alerts. We covered this in detail in our website uptime monitoring and alerting guide for small businesses. Uptime Kuma builds on this foundation: it provides both monitors and a status page in one tool, with a simple UI and strong notification support.

What Is Uptime Kuma and Why Do We Like It?

Uptime Kuma is an open-source uptime monitoring tool and status page generator that you host on your own server. Think of it as a friendly, self-hosted alternative to commercial monitoring dashboards. It offers:

• Multiple monitor types: HTTP(S), TCP, ping, DNS, push-based heartbeats, MQTT and more.
• Integrated status pages: Public or private pages that show component health, uptime percentages and incident notes.
• Flexible notifications: Email, Telegram, Slack-compatible webhooks, Discord, SMS gateways and custom webhooks.
• Multi-language interface: Useful for global teams or multilingual businesses.
• Self-hosted control: You decide where data lives, how it is backed up and how it is secured.
• Container-friendly deployment: Official Docker images make installation predictable.

For many dchost.com customers, Uptime Kuma hits a sweet spot: powerful enough for agencies and SaaS projects, but simple enough for a single admin to manage alongside existing hosting services.

If you want to go even deeper on metrics, log analysis and alerting, you can combine Uptime Kuma with Prometheus and Grafana. We’ve written a practical tutorial on VPS monitoring and alerts with Prometheus, Grafana and Uptime Kuma, which fits perfectly with the status page approach we’ll describe here.

Choosing Where to Host Your Uptime Kuma Instance

Your status page should ideally stay available even when your main production environment has issues. That means placing Uptime Kuma on infrastructure that is:

• Stable: Good network connectivity, reliable power and professional data center operations.
• Isolated enough: Not sharing every single failure point with the site it monitors.
• Easy to secure and back up: Hardening, firewalling and snapshot/backups should be straightforward.

Common patterns we see with our customers:

• Small projects: Uptime Kuma hosted on the same VPS as the main site, but with separate containers and backups. Simple and cost‑effective.
• Growing businesses: Uptime Kuma on a small dedicated VPS at dchost.com, monitoring multiple production servers in different locations.
• Larger setups / agencies: A dedicated monitoring node (VPS or bare metal) in a separate region or data center, sometimes combined with VPN/mesh networks for internal checks.

Wherever you host it, treat your monitoring server like any other internet-facing system: configure a firewall, close unnecessary ports, enforce TLS and keep software up to date. Our VPS security hardening checklist and our calmer, step-by-step guide on how to secure a VPS server both give you concrete sshd, firewall and update practices that apply perfectly to an Uptime Kuma node.

Basic Sizing Guidelines

Uptime Kuma itself is lightweight. A small VPS (for example, 1 vCPU, 1–2 GB RAM and a few GB of disk) can handle dozens to hundreds of monitors without trouble, as long as other workloads are modest. If you plan to monitor many high-traffic services, retain long histories or run Prometheus/Grafana on the same host, increase CPU, RAM and disk accordingly.

If you’re unsure how to size things, our guide on calculating CPU, RAM and bandwidth for new websites is a good starting point. The same thinking applies to your monitoring stack: estimate how frequently you’ll probe, how many targets you’ll watch and how long you’ll keep data.

Installing Uptime Kuma on a VPS or Dedicated Server

Let’s walk through a practical installation on a Linux VPS. We’ll outline two common approaches:

1. Running Uptime Kuma via Docker (recommended for most people).
2. Running it with Node.js directly on the host.

These steps assume you have:

• Root or sudo access to your server.
• A basic firewall (like ufw or firewalld) configured.
• A domain or subdomain ready to point to this server for the status page.

Option 1: Install Uptime Kuma with Docker

Docker keeps Uptime Kuma and its dependencies separated from your base system, making upgrades and backups easier.

1. Install Docker

On Ubuntu, a typical installation looks like this:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo 
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] 
  https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu 
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-plugin

Enable and start Docker:

sudo systemctl enable docker --now

2. Create Directories for Uptime Kuma

sudo mkdir -p /opt/uptime-kuma
sudo mkdir -p /opt/uptime-kuma/data
sudo chown -R $(whoami):$(whoami) /opt/uptime-kuma

3. Create a docker-compose.yml

In /opt/uptime-kuma/docker-compose.yml:

version: '3.8'
services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
    container_name: uptime-kuma
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"  # Internal port

4. Start Uptime Kuma

cd /opt/uptime-kuma
sudo docker compose up -d

Now Uptime Kuma listens on port 3001. You can visit http://<server-ip>:3001 to complete initial setup. Later, you will put a reverse proxy with HTTPS in front and bind it to a nice domain like status.example.com.

Option 2: Install Uptime Kuma Without Docker (Node.js)

If you prefer not to use containers, you can run Uptime Kuma directly with Node.js. The official documentation provides up-to-date commands, but the rough outline is:

1. Install Node.js LTS from a trusted repository.
2. Clone the Uptime Kuma repository.
3. Install dependencies and build the app.
4. Run it under a process manager (PM2 or systemd service).

For example, after installing Node.js and git:

cd /opt
sudo git clone https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma.git
sudo chown -R $(whoami):$(whoami) uptime-kuma
cd uptime-kuma
npm run setup

Then you can create a systemd service to keep Uptime Kuma running at boot. The Docker method is usually simpler to keep consistent across environments, especially if you are already using containers for other services.

Putting Uptime Kuma Behind HTTPS with a Reverse Proxy

Running a status page on plain HTTP and a raw port is not ideal. Instead, we recommend:

• Pointing a domain or subdomain (such as status.example.com) to the monitoring server.
• Using Nginx, Caddy or another web server as a reverse proxy in front of Uptime Kuma.
• Issuing a free TLS certificate via Let’s Encrypt and automating renewals.

We have covered full HTTP to HTTPS migrations, including HSTS and canonical settings, in our guide on safe SSL migrations without SEO loss. The same principles apply to your status domain: enforce HTTPS, set appropriate redirects and keep certificates renewed automatically.

Example Nginx Reverse Proxy

A simple Nginx configuration (assuming Uptime Kuma listens on localhost:3001):

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name status.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3001/;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

After verifying that HTTP works, use certbot or your preferred ACME client to add HTTPS and redirects. If you are new to Let’s Encrypt automation, our article on free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt and automatic renewal is a great reference.

Configuring Monitors and Status Pages in Uptime Kuma

With the base installation ready and HTTPS configured, you can start adding monitors and designing your public status page.

Step 1: Create Your First Monitors

1. Log into Uptime Kuma as admin.
2. Click “Add New Monitor”.
3. Choose a monitor type, such as HTTP(s) or ping.
4. Enter the URL or host, friendly name and optional tags or groups.
5. Set the interval (for example, every 30 seconds or 1 minute).
6. Save and watch Uptime Kuma start collecting data.

Some useful monitor types in practice:

• HTTP(s): For websites, APIs and admin panels.
• Ping: For servers, routers and network devices.
• TCP port: For services such as SSH, SMTP, database ports or custom daemons.
• DNS: For verifying that critical domains resolve correctly.
• Heartbeat (push): For cron jobs or background workers that call back to Uptime Kuma after successful runs.

Step 2: Set Up Notifications

Next, configure how you want to be alerted.

1. Open the “Notification” section in Uptime Kuma.
2. Create one or more notification channels (email, chat, SMS gateway, etc.).
3. Attach these channels to your monitors or groups.
4. Fine-tune options like alert thresholds, recovery notifications and silence periods.

For critical production systems, you may want a tiered alert strategy: first send emails to the operations team, then escalate to a messaging channel if the incident lasts more than a few minutes.

Step 3: Build a Public Status Page

Uptime Kuma lets you create one or more status pages and decide which monitors appear on each. To create your main public status page:

1. Go to the “Status Pages” section.
2. Click “New Status Page” and choose a name and slug (for example, /status).
3. Select which monitors to show, group them into categories (e.g., “Websites”, “APIs”, “Backoffice”).
4. Customize colors, logos and texts to match your brand.
5. Choose whether the page is public or password-protected.

Many organizations use multiple pages: a public customer-facing status page and a more detailed internal status dashboard that exposes extra checks (for example, staging environments, in-office infrastructure or third‑party dependencies).

Designing Clear Incident and Maintenance Communication

A technically perfect monitoring setup is less useful if your communication during incidents is vague or inconsistent. You want your status page to answer three questions for users:

• “Is there a problem right now?”
• “What’s affected and what are you doing about it?”
• “When can I expect it to be resolved?”

Incident Lifecycle on Your Status Page

A simple, repeatable incident process might look like this:

1. Detection: Uptime Kuma marks a monitor as down and sends alerts.
2. Verification: An engineer confirms that the incident is real (not a false positive) and its scope.
3. Declaration: You create an incident entry on the status page, set the impacted components and add an initial message.
4. Updates: As you work, you post concise updates (e.g. root cause identified, workaround applied, monitoring recovery).
5. Resolution: Once systems are stable, you mark the incident as resolved.
6. Postmortem (optional but recommended): For major incidents, you later add a root cause and prevention summary.

You can use incident templates or predefined phrases to keep messages consistent. Avoid overly technical jargon; reserve deep technical analysis for internal documents.

Planned Maintenance and “Soft Downtime”

Planned maintenance is your chance to demonstrate professionalism rather than surprise users. Uptime Kuma lets you mark periods as scheduled maintenance or temporarily disable alerts. Combine that with a status page announcement so customers know what to expect.

We covered this in depth in our article on maintenance windows and downtime pages. The key ideas you can reuse for your status page:

• Announce maintenance early and clearly, including local times for major customer regions.
• Set expectations on impact (full downtime, read‑only mode, performance degradation).
• Update the status page during the window if anything changes.
• Close the maintenance event with a short summary of what was done.

Other Tools to Combine with Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is excellent for availability checks and human‑friendly status pages. For a more complete observability stack you can pair it with other open-source components:

• Prometheus: Time‑series metrics for CPU, RAM, disk, HTTP latency and custom business metrics.
• Grafana: Dashboards and visualization on top of Prometheus and other data sources.
• Centralized logging (Loki, ELK): To correlate errors and performance changes with uptime events.
• Error tracking (Sentry, etc.): For application-level exceptions and frontend issues.

Uptime Kuma can also send webhooks, so you can trigger external automation when checks fail (for example, toggling a feature flag, triggering a deploy rollback or opening an issue in your ticketing system).

For agencies and teams managing many clients, it’s common to run a monitoring stack in its own VPS or dedicated server, then configure each client project to be watched from there. Combined with our guidance on monitoring client websites at scale (uptime, SSL and domain renewal alerts), Uptime Kuma becomes the public face of a robust internal monitoring and alerting pipeline.

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls

Best Practices

• Monitor what matters, not everything: Focus on user-facing endpoints and critical dependencies. Too many noisy checks will reduce signal quality.
• Use multiple check types: Combine HTTP checks with ping/TCP for a clearer picture of whether a host is up but the application is misbehaving.
• Test alert channels: Do a controlled test outage and make sure alerts actually reach inboxes, chat channels and phones.
• Document your incident playbook: Write down who declares incidents, who updates the status page and who has final say on resolution.
• Secure your monitoring server: Restrict panel access, enforce strong passwords and 2FA where possible, and regularly update packages.
• Back up Uptime Kuma data: The data directory (or container volume) contains your configuration and history; include it in your regular backup job.

Common Pitfalls

• Hosting status page and main site on the same fragile server: If that single server fails, both your service and the status page vanish. Consider at least a small separate VPS.
• Too aggressive intervals: Extremely frequent checks (e.g. every second) may cause false positives and unnecessary load. Start with 30–60 seconds and adjust.
• Ignoring SSL/TLS on the status page: Users expect sensitive information (like incident descriptions or case URLs) to be served over HTTPS.
• Overly technical messaging: “TCP timeout from backend 10.12.3.5:9000” means little to non‑technical stakeholders. Translate it into impact: “Checkout requests are failing for some users; we’re rolling back a configuration change.”
• No redundancy for notifications: Relying on a single email system or chat integration can delay alerts. Add a backup notification path.

Summary: Turn Uptime Monitoring into a Transparent Service Experience

A status page is more than a pretty dashboard; it’s part of your brand promise. When you pair reliable probing with honest, timely communication, you show customers that you take reliability seriously even when things are not perfect. With Uptime Kuma you can self‑host that capability on your own VPS, dedicated server or colocated hardware at dchost.com, keep full control over your data, integrate with existing monitoring tools and customize the look and feel.

The journey typically looks like this: start by defining what you need to monitor, deploy Uptime Kuma on a secure server, place it behind HTTPS with a dedicated status domain, configure a handful of monitors and notifications, then iterate on your incident and maintenance communication style. As your infrastructure grows, you can connect Uptime Kuma to Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logs and more advanced failover or scaling architectures.

If you want help choosing the right hosting environment for your monitoring stack or sizing a VPS for your applications and status page together, our team at dchost.com is ready to assist. Explore our VPS, dedicated and colocation options, and combine them with the best practices we’ve shared here and in our other guides to build a calm, predictable uptime and communication platform your users can rely on.