Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

We do this with Chatterous.com, and it works perfectly. We set up a group, added our monitoring email as a member and have it email the group when something goes wrong. We get alerts on our phone, IM, or email. The best part is that one of us also can respond (via phone or IM) to let the others know someone is taking action on the alert.

I send emails.<p>a) Way more reliable.<p>b) Also land on my phone [with vibration/sound alert]<p>c) I can put a lot more details in them since there is no 140 chars limit<p>d) Much easier to do: one line of code - old and simple tech from the 80s (sendmail) beats ugly kids of tomorrow (Twitter) any day of the week!<p>Mr. Schmidt was right. :-P

We do this for both <a href="http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity" rel="nofollow">http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/cogenuity" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/cogenuity</a>) and <a href="http://www.code-roller.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.code-roller.com</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/code_roller" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/code_roller</a>)

What do you do when Twitter is down?<p>Why not use pingdom for monitoring like Twitter does.<p><a href="http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?name=Twitter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?...</a><p>We use pingdom at 3b and love it.

Leaving the Twitter feed public could actually be a nice way to make site status and maintenance transparent with your users.

With the amount of time Twitter is down would make this an interesting test.

imho, twitter (and others like it) will morph into a public messaging protocol. as more and more people use it the signal will get drowned by the noise. eventually the only worthwhile way of using twitter will be via enhanced filtering rules for meaningful information from people you know and follow.<p>twitter is really like a public pastebin with great api support which will allow you to command and control computers remotely. soon the posted messages will be encrypted nuggets taking the Public out of public.

My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.

You could probably pair this advice with <a href="http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/" rel="nofollow">http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/</a> in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.