True. However this specific type of failure should be relatively rare. I expect most of my outages to be either network issues or a powered off machine (TCP tim

True. However this specific type of failure should be relatively rare. I expect most of my outages to be either network issues or a powered off machine (TCP timeout) or the web service is not running (TCP RST). Accepting a connection and not replying is just rare for something as dumb as an HTTP request for a static file.