Cachet
Hosting

Cachet is one of those tools where the value is wildly out of proportion to what it costs to run. A status page that says "API is degraded, here's what we know, here's the ETA" buys you more goodwill in five minutes than three pages of crisis comms ever will. I've watched customer tickets drop by half on incident days when there's a credible status page sitting at status.example.com telling people the truth.

I've installed Cachet for our own internal use and for a handful of clients over the years. The Laravel base means it behaves like every other Laravel app on our platform. PHP 8.5 is fine. MySQL 8 is fine. The composer dependencies install cleanly through the one-click installer, and there are no exotic PHP extensions to chase.

"A status page isn't a luxury. It's the cheapest customer support tool you'll ever buy. If you're running anything that occasionally breaks, and everything occasionally breaks, get one up before you need it."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What I'd flag for anyone setting one up: don't skip the queue worker. Cachet uses Laravel queues for outbound notifications, and if you don't have a worker running, subscribers won't receive anything when you post an incident. On shared hosting we set up a small cron that runs the queue listener every minute. It's a one-time setup and then it's invisible. If you're on our managed cloud, we configure supervisor instead, which is cleaner and restarts the worker automatically if it dies.

The other thing worth getting right early is your component list. It's tempting to list every microservice you have, but the people reading your status page are users, not engineers. They want to know "can I log in", "can I checkout", "is the dashboard working". Group your components around user-facing capabilities, not internal architecture. You can always tighten it later, but if you launch with twenty components named after Kubernetes pods, nobody will trust the page.

For a smaller setup, daily backups and free SSL on shared hosting is genuinely all you need. Status pages aren't a high-traffic application even on a bad day; the worst case is that incidents drive a spike of curious visitors, and that's still measured in thousands of hits, not millions. We pre-cache the public page on our CDN so even a heavy spike barely touches the origin server.

Where I'd push someone toward a managed cloud server is if they're running Cachet alongside a wider Laravel estate and want everything in one place with SSH, supervisor, and a proper deploy pipeline. For a standalone status page, our cheapest hosting plan is more than enough.