'Outside Your Infrastructure, Always Up' AWS has outages too, also statuspage.io own site reports, Hosted Pages Uptime 99.969% 99.969 != always. Pricing also isn't too shabby, Enterprise starts at $1499/mo. Billed annually. For small 18.000$ a year, one should be able to setup your own external monitoring, with email, Facebook, twitter and what not for hooks to update your users of the service status where the sky is…
Enterprise pricing is not about being cheaper than it would be for you to do it yourself. It's about you simply not having to do it yourself. You might be an organization that only employs 5 developers. It's much easier to pay a small fraction of what you pay one of them than it is to pull 1-3 of them off of what they're working on and have them build you a buggy implementation of the same thing that won't be ready f…
Setting up the statuspage.io, monitoring it, keeping things as they should, adding new stuff to monitor thats not a task one of those 5 will be doing regularly? And what if he does a poor job at that? You end up with what you say, the same buggy level of monitoring. So what _is_ the excuse not to make your own and pay significant amounts of money to a third party?
I say 18.000 is a lot of money for a service that reports your outages (good 3 month salary here, and in three months one can code a lot). And if you do it yourself you have all the freedom of choice how you monitor what you monitor how you report to your users instead of relying on the options statuspage.io offers, there is no limit
And why would your own monitoring be more buggy then some setup a third party deems to be ideal? You can make a perfect fit, gives you another view on your own products etc. Full control is key, in house solutions, not saving money.