Status / Method
Method
What is measured, how often, and what these numbers cannot tell you.
The probe
One HTTPS GET per domain, following up to three redirects, with a five second connect timeout and an eight second total timeout. Certificate verification is on: a domain serving a bad certificate is a failure, not a pass.
Results are cached for fifteen minutes in a file above every docroot. Without that cache this page would turn every visitor into a burst of requests against the group's own sites, which would be a strange thing for a status board to do.
The states
- Serving: HTTP 200 with a real response body.
- Placeholder: HTTP 200, but the body is the host's parking page. The domain resolves and hosting is active, and there is no site on it. This is reported separately because a plain uptime check would call it green.
- Error: reached, but returned something other than 200.
- Unreachable: DNS, TLS or connection failure. The underlying error is shown.
What these numbers are not
They are a single vantage point on shared hosting, not a distributed monitor. Response time includes this server's own network path and will be worse than what a visitor elsewhere sees, or better, and there is no way to tell which from here.
This is not an audit and it is not a service level commitment. It is the group measuring itself and publishing the result, including the unflattering rows.
No manual override
There is no admin switch to mark something green. The only way a row turns green is for the probe to succeed. A status page that can be edited by hand during an incident is not a status page, it is a press release.
Machine readable
The same data is at /status.json, with the timestamp of the measurement.