Would you pay for business critical Twitter service?

The Twitter chaps are out and about explaining as best they can the recent ‘weirdness’ with their service. It all sounds fair enough to me — this paragraph appears on my Twitter frontpage at the moment:

We’ve tracked down the missing update issue. You may see some old updates appear as we resolve it. Thank you for your patience.

This isn’t sufficient for many users. For example, here’s a chap by the name of Aaron responding to the Twitter post:

Twitter Blog: Weekend Web Weirdness

Aaron said…
“we realize it’s annoying” – ?

When the whole point of the service (to post messages and make them available) isn’t working, it’s not just annoying, it’s broken.

Why, when it’s been broken for 3 days, is this the first communication about the problem?

I’m not entirely clear on Twitter’s beta status. Is it a beta? I don’t see ‘beta’ anywhere. However it’s free to use.

Now part of me thinks that price is irrelevant — it is their duty to keep service moving fast and smoothly, especially given the nature of the service.

The other part of me thinks that, if I was the CEO — or the venture capitalist paying for it all — I’d be a weee bit annoyed. There’s no doubt it costs a good amount of cash to maintain and grow the Twitter infrastructure. Those text messages I’m receiving all day and all night cost money and I sure am not paying for them.

Which leads me to this question: For those of you using Twitter like no tomorrow, would you pay $2 per month (or more) for an ultra reliable uber-priority guaranteed service?

I think I’d be happy with a few dollars a month to help guarantee service.