With the amount of time Twitter is down would make this an interesting test.
How much are they down these days? I thought they had gotten past the massive reliability issues they used to have.
Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
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Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#12We 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.
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#13My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
We send emails too, but it's also nice to get a TXT on your phone for really urgent information such as a problem with the server.
I think his point was that twitter-to-sms isn't always as prompt as you want it to be.
YMMV, but in my experience twitter would be prompter than the typical SMS service from a big carrier. More reliable, too.
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#15You could probably pair this advice with http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#16My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.
Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#17Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just email to yournumber@yourcarrier.net and get it as an sms too?
The author addressed this in the article.
But then he chooses the second most unreliable route?
I think this approach is neat and novel, but ultimately I don't believe they've solved their problems.
YAPS/SMSClient with a good gateway SMS provider, if the SMS is that critical. I don't understand why email only is a failure, assuming they have push email to their phone (and if you don't, well why not?)
Re: Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
#19My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.
Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.
Actually it is very simple: adding Twitter to the mix adds one more "moving part". Shooting a simple email and then multiplexing it (via aliasing, for instance) to X recipients is easier and more reliable. Create an address like my-startup-site-is-down@gmail.com and forward to X other destinations from there (including Twitter if you want), and send your notifications to that address using standard 20+ year old protocols and tools, instead of some 3rd party proprietary stuff which was "released often, released early" and hasn't crashed "in months"