[OpenLayers-Users] Alternatives to labs.metacarta WMS?

[Jani Patokallio]

Greetings,

The labs.metacarta.com WMS server has been spending a lot more time down
than up recently, and while I know it's rather ungrateful to whinge
about a free service that is "not yet commercially supported , so [it]
may disappear without warning or perform erratically", this is causing
not just my OpenLayers app, but the demo map on openlayers.org to fail
as well -- pretty bad PR for our favorite mapping software.  So...

a) Are there any alternatives for a plain-vanilla, political,
entire-world, *non-spherical-projected* map?   (NASA's Blue Marble is OK
for satellite imagery, but it's also much slower and for me the detail
is unnecessary.)
b) Is there any way to programmatically detect when a map server is
down, and switch to something else?
c) Has MetaCarta (or somebody else) considered offering a "stable"
server, perhaps protected by API key?  I'd be happy to chip in a few
bucks a year to keep one up.

Cheers,
-jani