Add a "is alive" message

This page is a capture in the next bucket of the product backlog — a pre-sprint idea, not yet pulled into a sprint as a story.

We need to brainstorm this. At present we can only tell if a server is there or not by connecting. It would be nice to give some visual indicator to the user that the server is not up as soon as the user types the host. this may not be a good idea.

Notes:

• could tell client if registration / sign-up is supported.