The Status Server must be designed to be as reliable as possible. Reliability must be the number one goal throughout the design, development, and testing phase.
However, down-time is always a possibility either due to a bug in the Status Server, a problem on the machine hosting the Status Server, or for required maintenance or upgrades. As a result, clients must be designed to handle the condition of not being able to connect to the Status Server. In addition, the Status Server must serialize a copy of itself to disk every 10 minutes. The Status Server must then have the ability to be restarted by first loading it's state information from the serialized disk copy. Using this approach, it should be possible to restart the Status Server on another machine in case there is a problem with the machine running the Status Server.