One thing that I really valued from my web host was a candor about outages, explaining notable failures in uptime. I can understand it's delicate when you're a startup trying to get traction, but those of us trying to keep services up depending upon yours would appreciate a bit of insight into what happened on mornings like today.
I heartily agree - there should be a way for developers to check the status of the web services and find out details about planned and unplanned downtime. We are working now on expanding our monitoring services and capabilities, so stay tuned. As for this morning's down time, there was a glitch in some retry logic that killed the web server. Everything is back online now and the engineers are examining the corpse.