Twitter has many faces. People tweet about anything really. There are those who find it entertaining. On the other side, many people can’t make heads or tails out of it. We also have the numerous business accounts trying to inform the world about their service. Due to its simplicity, there are a lot of ways to use Twitter. One more recent approach is to use Twitter to keep an eye on your server.

You can have your sever tweet. Now that is an idea to keep your mind occupied and by “occupied” I mean to make you wonder what the practical use of it will be. It might look illogical to have your server spam the web with random updates on its status. People are rarely interested in such information. Fortunately, people have little to do here. Letting your server tweet about itself can be a great way to keep and eye on it by using no special app but rather your browser or tweet client.

Recently we witnessed a website becoming inaccessible for about 10 minutes. It doesn’t sound that bad, if it were a regular site. The problem comes from the fact that this site had only one purpose – to record the votes for a TV contest with a limited voting timeframe of 10 minutes.

This could have been avoided easily with no extra expenses for server hardware or premium hosting service. They only had to use Lighttpd, a lightweight open-source web server. After all, they only had to serve these 2 pages, one holding the voting options and one more to let you know that your vote was submitted.

“We don’t need external service to monitor our sites. We have people on staff to take care of this.”

Many people think like this. Many people, who make important decisions in your company, might think like this. They are both right and wrong. They are right about 99% of the time and we are wrong about 1% of the time. Then again, that 1% percent seems to matter to business owners, as we have come to understand.