[boothead]

My intuition would be that status.service.com is not a useful place to look if service.com is down...

edit that's not supposed to be as snarkey as it sounds reading it back :-)

edit again The reason for this intuition is that I assume that not being able to reach service.com could indicate a DNS problem. Possibly from the comments below I need to go and read a DNS book :-)

[cpfohl]

Most services run their `status` service on a different server entirely. It's the only possible way it could ever make sense.

[maaaats]

My intuition is that it is. I didn't know github was really down, but had problem accessing it. Went to status.github.com and got the results, not really knowing if the address existed or not (just guessed).

These sites are often hosted away from the main service, and thus available even when problems occur.

[jamesroseman]

Actually, I've always checked status.service to see if Github is up, it must be hosted on a separate server.