Ask HN: Should I build this idea?

[curbenthusiasm]

Hi,

I was wondering what some of you thought of this idea I am considering going ahead and trying to build-- so the general gist is that it would be a way to automatically keep your customers updated on the status of their site when it goes down. So what does that mean? Simply put, it would be a third party twitter application that checks the status of your website multiple times per day, and when it picks up a 503 status, it will automatically tweet out a preset message saying "We know we're down, but we'll be back up soon! Please stay tuned."(just an example) Then, it will continually check your site, and when it's live again, another tweet will be sent saying "We're back! Sorry about that folks!".... The point of this service is it will take care of customer service in terms of keeping customers/users updated on the status of your site, automatically.

Thoughts? Would you use it?

Thanks!

[issa]

The obvious drawback that jumps out to me would be bombarding otherwise happy users with reports of your site going down. For example that 3am DB backup might have caused a 2 second outage (just an example...I'm sure we all know how to do DB backups properly) but none of your users would have even been aware of it without this "service".

That said, it would be useful in an application that people are counting on 24-7. But not sure how much of a market that would be. Not sure how much of a market there would be in any case.

[curbenthusiasm]

Hmm... I guess it could check, and if it's down, automatically check again in 5 mins to confirm. Or, you could turn it off at certain times, such as 9 pm to 6 am lets say...