Using twitter as an outage notification

[lists at internetpolicyagency.com (Roland Perry)]

In article <20090705113248.GP1499 at hezmatt.org>, Matthew Palmer 
<mpalmer at hezmatt.org> writes
>There are web hosting providers whose 18c/year hosting plans can't handle a
>few thousand requests to a static page over a period of maybe 15 minutes
>without falling over?  The mind boggles.

Apparently so. Of course, they could be deliberately throttled, rather 
than run on inherently low-bandwidth kit. Which raises the issue of 
whether such throttling schemes should take account of short bursts.
-- 
Roland Perry