It was DNS again: Why your status page needs its own domain

On February 20, 2025, at 11:22 AM Eastern Time, StatusGator detected an outage affecting Vultr, the cloud computing provider, caused by a DNS failure that took down vultr.com -- along with its status page, status.vultr.com. Without an independently hosted status page, Vultr customers were left in the dark. But StatusGator customers who monitor Vultr received word of the outage, ensuring they could react accordingly.

Why a Separate Domain Matters

This incident underscores a crucial best practice: Your status page should never be hosted on your primary domain. When DNS fails, a status page on the same domain goes down with it -- exactly when users need it the most. Ideally, your status page should use a separate domain, with a separate DNS provider. (Bonus points if you register it with a different registrar.)

Many companies make this mistake, even major providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) use the their main domain for their status page. Meanwhile, GitHub and Cloudflare follow our recommended advice and host their status pages on separate domains. ?? Their foresight ensures uninterrupted communication during outages -- even those that affect DNS. For Cloudflare this is essential, as DNS is part of their core offering.

How StatusGator Detected the Outage

While Vultr never acknowledged the incident on their status page, StatusGator’s Early Warning Signals alerted users in real-time. Our platform aggregates reports across the internet, often notifying customers before official status pages do (if they ever do).

Here's the best timeline we could piece together based on our available data:

• 11:15 AM ET - StatusGator receives first reports of Vultr services being unreachable.
• 11:22 AM ET - StatusGator Early Warning Signals algorithm detects the spike and notifies our customers.
• 11:22 AM to 12:00 PM ET - Reports of an issue affecting the Vultr dashboard continue to emerge across StatusGator, Reddit, and Bluesky.
• 12:10 PM ET - Users begin reporting that the outage appears resolved or is now intermittent.
• 12:30 PM ET - Connectivity generally reported as restored.

Get Early Warning Signals

Vultr’s outage is a reminder: Separate your status page from your main domain to ensure users stay informed. And if you want proactive outage alerts before they’re officially acknowledged, try StatusGator’s Early Warning Signals. We now support almost 5,000 services and you can integrate our platform with dozens of integrations. Try it out yourself with a free trial or book a demo for a personal tour.

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