As somebody else here said, it’s easy to tell if the site is down. And I don’t need to go to another site to confirm it.
What sucks is having to manually come back every 10 minutes, then 30 minutes, then hours at a time to see if the site is back up. And even then, after it came back up the other day, images weren’t been served properly for hours afterwards meaning I couldn’t finish the post I was writing.
Apple’s developer site has a system status service you can access via this link. You can tell at a glance if there are issues anywhere. Itch would need such a detailed chart, but a few stoplights showing current status would be nice. And should be fairly easy to automate.