DNS should have a mechanism for designating failover IPs, so you could e.g. host a static HTML saying "it's down" on some CDN as far as possible topologically from the rest of your network, so it displays when your status page is down too.
However, status pages are first and foremost marketing tools, so I wouldn't expect anyone setting such mechanism up.
You know, there's a proposal of treating HTTP names the same way SMTP works. That proposal includes adding low-priority servers that should be used only when the high priority fails.
All the mainstream browsers have already said they won't ever implement it.
Oh, neat! Thanks for pointing that out; I somehow got this far in life without realizing that SRV records have priority and weight fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record has a decent summary) - I only knew that they let you specify a port, which would already be a huge advantage. Darn, now I'm even more annoyed that browsers don't handle them:(
The one rationale I know is that there is a competitive issue, where the first browser to adopt it will have slightly slower page loads, but won't gain anything yet because no site uses it.
The slightly slower page loads is one extra round trip to the DNS server (that is supposed to be close to you). It can be solved at the DNS side, and last time I looked, about a decade ago, was indeed solved at the default configuration of most open-source servers. But the large providers don't use the default configuration of their servers.
Yeah. There was someone a few years ago who said something like, "If your website doesn't have a status page, it does have one on Twitter". Wish I could find the quote source.
Likely it's hosted on the same infrastructure. The general recommendation is to host the status page on different provider so it's more likely to stay up.
Create a static status page on yourserver.com/status.html and write:
If you can't read this, it means the status of yourserver.com is: DOWN