A properly configured $5 VPS can handle a massive amount of traffic if it's just serving a single static (cached) page.

But to follow up on your point: I hope the EB script that updates the pages automatically while doing maintenance will not wait for a response to its POST requests before actually letting EB perform the maintenance. Otherwise you create a crucial unwanted dependency on your status server.

Indeed a properly configured VPS can - What I mean is make sure it's properly configured before chucking a status page on it. The post didn't really go into the properly configured part.

I cannot attest to the 'properly configured' part. I simply used their Ubuntu Droplet 'out of the box' apart from installing MySQL on it. Would love it if you can point me at a guide or post on how to configure a Digital Ocean droplet for better availability and reliability.

Thanks for the observation, but currently there are no dependencies with those scripts. They are simply 'fire and forget' while EB gets on with the other tasks at hand.

We currently only have a few hundred daily users who use our site, so I would expect the load limit on out status server should the main site go down will be very low.

Definitely as we grow (and our revenues support it), I will either increase the capacity of our Droplet, or else look at a commercial alternative.