There wasn't a good, reasonable way to buy cheap roaming-data, at least not with my German contract. 150MB of roaming in the EU was 5€ with the purchase process (via SMS) being bugged and failing 50% of the time, sometimes charging my credit card instantly while delivering the "You can use your roaming data now" message days later when I was back home, customer support could not help because they "do not suggest that the data is available instantly". n=1, obviously.
Not sure about 2 - What are your arguments for this?
If the status page relies on getting updated information from the service, it may not even notice when the whole thing just crashes and goes down in flames. Attempting to do some predefined calls to the service to evaluate whether it is working correctly appears like a better solution?