I want to write a another web application in early 2010. Here is the first idea I had. Rain some criticism down or heap some praise. I haven't seen this service out there, so if I missed it somewhere, please tell me.
Idea 1: The Hosting Provider Incident Tracker (HPIT)
A real time database where we track major (and minor) incidents at hosting providers around the world. Too many times I have asked hosting providers about their history of incidents only to receive vague assertions about 100% uptime and heroic stories surviving the great blackouts of our time. This always fails to impress me. What would REALLY impress me is a provider who would give me a link to their incident history with detailed technical explanations around the root causes (ugh, hate that word) and mitigation steps. Sadly, providers still want to sell the snakeoil of 100% uptime. This isn't the point, because there isn't 100% uptime. There is only honest and timely response to inevitable outages. This is what matters. This, however, opens the door for an independent tracker of these incidents. This service will vet incident reports, seek and post responses from hosting providers, or simply link to their own responses, and be your source for evaluating how a hosting company responds to critical issues.
BTW: I don't know why Pingdom isn't providing this service today. It has most of the data required already.