Rightly so. My point is a company can self-audit without having to pay a competitor.

I think that is inherently riskier because you never know on what axis you will have a failure and it is difficult to exclude all shared axes.

But we're talking about a status page which should be basically static. In it's simplest form you need a rack in 2+ random colos and a few people to manage the page update framework. Then you make teams submit the tests that are used to validate SLA. Run the tests from a few DCs and rebuild the status page every minute or two.

Maybe add a CDN. This shit isn't rocket science and being able to accurately monitor your own systems from off infrastructure is the one time you should really be separate.

That applies when you use competitors too.

They could have a related outage, or even a coincidentally timed one

Absolutely. And even if it’s cheaper to use the competition, an expensive custom solution will be found.