The Evan Day Status Page

Creating a status page to give an overview of what services I run!

If you look at any say, platform services provider or software as a service provider, they generally always have a status page. Status pages are very handy ways of communicating outages or planned maintenance activity to their customers. Now for me, generally speaking for my services, the customers are in the singular, in fact it’s just one, me! I’m very aware when some service of mine is broken, so in a way I don’t particularly need this. But, I think it’s a great way of showing what I am running in terms of infrastructure and software and almost narrating my self hosted journey. So, enter my own status page!

You can see this for yourself over at https://status.evanwebservices.com. Hopefully when you visit it, everything is showing green! Things start off generally with the applications that I’m running. Then further down the list it’s more the infrastructure that powers most of those applications. So normally, something that’s experiencing an outage or maintenance, will affect some of the things above that item. There is also an incident history, so one can look back on what may have happened to a service in the past.

In terms of the stack, the tool I’m using is called Statusfy. It’s a NodeJS based application that primarily uses Markdown for the writing of incidents. It has two modes of operation, you can run it as a server, which gives you some features over the other mode, statically generated. I use the latter, mainly for optimizing cost. The main draw back I’ve seen from this mode is that in terms of time tracking, I have to manually commit so that the site regenerates and knows the current date. This I’m hoping to solve with just setting up a Github Action to commit every day. For running the website itself, I decided to use CloudFlare Pages which is a relatively new product from them that powers JAM stack websites. Since I already have a Pro plan with them, I have a lot more builds available to me. So far, it’s worked quite well! There has been the odd build failure or build timeout here or there, but since this is not super critical in the grand scheme of things, it’s acceptable.

So, that’s that! I really enjoy running this status page, it almost gives me a sense of pride to see everything that I run and encourages me to run a lot more! When I’m talking to someone about self hosting, it can be nearly easier to just tell them where to visit and they can see for themselves what I’m talking about. Or, say I’m interviewing for a job or someone is researching me as a possible candidate, looking at the status page could give a good overview to them to see what I’m capable of. But yeah, really fun to see this grow and I just wanted to share how it has been going!