Transparency and a Better Internet by Combining Twitter With Site Monitoring

VASTERAS, Sweden, November 5 /PRNewswire/ --     When Google's Gmail is down, thousands complain on Twitter. If Amazon has
problems with its cloud services, you hear about it on Twitter. If a web
hosting company has issues, you hear about it on Twitter. Twitter has given
consumers a voice, and companies are listening.

In other words, Twitter has become a discovery engine for service issues.
But only if people effectively let the world know about those issues in the
first place.

Pingdom, a service that monitors the reliability of websites and services
on the Internet, has now made it possible to automate this process. Pingdom
users can choose to automatically send Twitter status messages when their
monitored sites have downtime, notifying not just themselves, but the world.

"Using social media such as Twitter to reach out is very good for
transparency and certainly helps you get attention to a problem," says Sam
Nurmi, CEO of Pingdom. "We monitor hundreds of thousands of websites and
online services for our users, and the differences we see in hosting
reliability are staggering. Many providers leave a lot be desired. Those are
the ones that need a wake-up call."

Public knowledge of service issues will have a positive long-term effect
because reliable providers will be rewarded, while unreliable providers will
lose customers. This will give negligent providers a strong incentive to
improve, which in turn will raise the overall quality of hosting and services
on the Internet. In short, it will make the Internet better.

"We are seeing the start of an era when providers won't be able to hide
poor service," says Sam Nurmi. "We here at Pingdom want to help out 'the
little guy' by letting people combine our monitoring service with Twitter. We
have even made it possible for anyone to use our service for free, because a
better Internet would benefit all of us."

About Pingdom:

Pingdom monitors the reliability and performance of websites and services 
on the Internet, alerting site owners of problems. The service has both free 
and paid plans, and has tens of thousands of users all over the world. 
Customers include Twitter, Spotify, Rackspace and Last.fm. For more 
information, please visit http://www.pingdom.com.