Concerning the checker script,it is kinda subjective to the overall support and quality of service. What i mean is, I've bumped into various configurations that where different than the D7 requirements, but were configurable through the php ini file, which i didn't know at all at that time! But the guys supporting (the had a banner advertising they support Dolphin) me offered fixing it within 2 minutes and voila! requirements are met! It's nice knowing someone's got your back!

As for the benchmarking see more i dunno if it would be at all helpful. We all probably started with 10-50 users on our Websites, so being concerned about the (glorious/10k user) future is simply naive.So we should just try to stay within the limitations of "what you pay is what you get", until able to do something better like a clustered hosting i guess.So why not measuring the times taken for loads, or even better doing the math around the utilisation on the server?

Most Webmasters see an outage as something generally wring but it could reside from various vectors of malfunction or even attacks. DoS attacks could be the reason, a server's restart,hardware malfunction, network outage!