Using twitter as an outage notification

Sun Jul 5 17:04:10 UTC 2009

In article <4A50C401.9070307 at gmail.com>, JC Dill 
<jcdill.lists at gmail.com> writes

>> Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news 
>>means it can't cope with the traffic.

>Really?  Um, wow.  How big is this school?  Is the webserver on an ISDN 
>line?

It appears to be at a co-location centre in a distant city. I expect 
it's provided as part of a package by one of the $5 domain hosting 
companies. The bandwidth limiting is more likely a quota than a lack of 
connectivity.

>> I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, 
>>just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.

>This is a case where it makes *perfect* sense to offload emergency 
>notifications to another, larger system such as twitter,

That's my current view, too.

> you can use posterus

It's going to be hard enough getting them to be comfortable with 
Twitter.
-- 
Roland Perry