My first service outage from my current hosting company (that I’m aware of) occurred yesterday, and lasted up to 3.5 hours (according to the logs - it may not have been exactly that long, but probably pretty close). Fortunately, it was resolved fairly quickly.
It does look like I’ll have to start monitoring it more closely, as they never proactively sent me anything letting me know it was down, and if I hadn’t tried using it myself during that time, they probably would have hoped I didn’t notice. Even the first person I corresponded with said they were not aware of the outage (I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were just not informed yet).
I’ll probably write a quick application that will poll the site every x number of minutes (probably 5 or so), and alert me if it’s down, so I can get on them immediately instead of either waiting until I find out some other way, or I don’t notice at all. If I see any regular pattern emerging I may need to consider getting a discount or moving providers if it’s really bad.