New! Pingdom adds Twitter alerts
Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.
Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).
You can of course still get Pingdom alerts via email and SMS, just like before.
Pingdom has actually had Twitter as a customer for a long time, and using their service to add even more value to ours was the next logical step for us.
Promoting openness about site problems on Twitter
Part of our goal with the Pingdom uptime monitoring service has from the very beginning been to promote transparency around the reliability of hosting and service providers on the Internet. We believe that people should be aware of service issues and that providers shouldn’t be able to hide them from their users.
People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.
Free Pingdom + Twitter = Free SMS alerts
Since Pingdom is already free to use (for monitoring one site), the combination with Twitter means that people can use Twitter alerts to get free SMS alerts as well via Twitter. This will work everywhere where Twitter offers free SMS, for example in the United States, Canada and for some mobile operators in the United Kingdom.
It doesn’t have to cost a penny to monitor the availability of a site, even with a professional service like Pingdom which lets you test sites every minute. Downtime is more common than most people think, and it is now very easy for webmasters to make sure that their web hosting company is delivering a quality service. In short: stop speculating and get the facts.
We hope you will find the Twitter alerts useful.
For more information about Pingdom, please visit www.Pingdom.com or contact us.
Now that this decade is coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to list the very worst Internet disasters that happened between 2000 and 2009. And believe us, there have been some really big ones. Some you may remember, and some may be new to you, but they all affected a huge amount of Internet users.
Pingdom’s management team recently visited Boston, USA, for some meetings. On their way back they had some time left over at the airport and decided to get some work done. Nicely enough, Google is currently offering everyone 
The World Wide Web has promised a lot over the years. Thus far, some of those promises have been fulfilled, but there have also been disappointments. One area that I feel has been consistently disappointing in recent years is the promise of newer, more powerful, and more useful file formats. I’ll take a look at three of these: SVG, JPEG 2000, and MNG, below.
Stefan Seiz
October 21st, 2009 at 4:20 am
Feature request: If i want to receive alerts via twitter DM, i have to follow @pingdomalert. But this means i will have all your public alerts in my timeline, which i have no use for.
I suggest you add a second twitter account e.g. @pingdomalertdm where you never post public alerts and which you only use for sending DMs.
That way, i could receive DMs only by following @pingdomalertdm
Pingdom
October 21st, 2009 at 8:39 am
@Stefan Seiz: All “public” tweets from @pingdomalert are directed to a specific Twitter user (starting with @twittername). You won’t see those in your timeline even if you follow @pingdomalert. Only those directed at your user. (And ok, those users you follow, if they show up.)
Dan Butcher
October 21st, 2009 at 8:56 am
The ability to post from our twitter account would be great, so any of our followers would know something was down.
I don’t use Pingdom at the minute, but this would probably make me switch
Pingdom
October 21st, 2009 at 9:04 am
@Dan Butcher: Good idea, and one that’s occurred to us as well.
It’s on our to-do list.
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:15 am
Can we customise ‘tweets’?
We’d like to use something like “ooops – looks like serverx is having a problem. Don’t worry, we’re on to it!”
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:16 am
@Dan Butcher + 1
(didn’t realise it didn’t already do that – not much use to us then!)
Pingdom
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 am
@Simon Pearce: The ability to post via your own Twitter use is on its way (right now you can either get a DM or a status message to @youruser from @pingdomalert). Regarding customizing Twitter alert content, no immediate plans, but we’ll look into it.
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:06 am
Thanks @Pingdom – had ten mins free this morning so wrote this!
If you want to have Twitter update your own feed with up/down reports:
http://www.simplewebhosting.co.uk/blog/automatically-post-pingdom-updates-to-your-twitter-feed/
Pingdom
October 26th, 2009 at 8:27 am
@Dan Butcher and Simon Pearce: You can now send Pingdom alerts from your own Twitter accounts as well.