Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

blog.pardner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 139 posts

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#31

Post by [deleted] »

the_bear wrote: post #21
michaelw wrote: post #12

Why do you care? Do you think this helps your customer at all? Perhaps you're worried about your technical reputation. All you're doing is moving the blame to some part of your code to the decision you made to host on Heroku. Down is down. Unavailable is unavailable. To your customers that's all that matters. For what it's worth I think hosting on Heroku makes plenty of sense and I'm actually moving my app (Crisply)…

In my experience, users actually do care quite a bit. Back when my company was on Rackspace, we had several periods of significant downtime that weren't our fault. Customers who contacted us were very upset, but when we made it clear that it wasn't a bug with our software, but rather a problem with the hosting provider, they all calmed down. I believe there are at least a few key things a customer takes away from a m…

[deleted]

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#32

Post by iamleppert »

It’s your fault for not having a fault tolerant site that runs on another service provider. This is what happens when you put your eggs in one basket and that basket bursts into flames.

If reliability is so important, make it a priority instead of just expecting stuff to work or for a more politically correct error message — which leads me to my next point: who cares about the ERROR message? The damage has been done by that point and half the people won't bother to read any further. Queue sounds of people clicking back buttons as fast as they can.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#33

Post by famousactress »

pardner wrote: post #28
famousactress wrote: post #18

Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.

Actually I do not disagree.... I make the platform choices, so i live with the results. However, IMO an error message that distinguishes between an "hosting" issue and an "app" issue is not only fair, it is in fact, meaningful data to (at least some) customers.

I'm not sure about that either. If it was my product I think I'd want a polite on-brand 500 page saying my hamsters are working on it. Seeing something that suggests hosting is down doesn't frankly matter to me, even as a technical user... and to someone in between myself and my mom, with enough knowledge to understand what a "hosting company" is... I wonder if they might feel ripped off as well: "Oh great. I gave this company my money and they don't even have their own servers!"

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#34

Post by Snappy »

le_isms wrote: post #11
mshafrir wrote: post #8

Heroku has a mechanism for displaying custom error and maintenance pages, served off of S3. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages#customize_...

The earlier Heroku outage also brought down custom error pages. Our site was only displaying a 500 server error via nginx.

But was it serving _your_ 500 error page? In which case you could make it say anything you want. Heroku platform errors are not 500s; they're 502s (or 503s, I forget).

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#35

Post by neilmiddleton »

pardner wrote: post #28
famousactress wrote: post #18

Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.

Actually I do not disagree.... I make the platform choices, so i live with the results. However, IMO an error message that distinguishes between an "hosting" issue and an "app" issue is not only fair, it is in fact, meaningful data to (at least some) customers.

Why, do your users care?

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#36

Post by tlrobinson »

pardner wrote: post #28
famousactress wrote: post #18

Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.

Actually I do not disagree.... I make the platform choices, so i live with the results. However, IMO an error message that distinguishes between an "hosting" issue and an "app" issue is not only fair, it is in fact, meaningful data to (at least some) customers.

The people who care that it's a Heroku issue not app issue (hint: not many) have probably already heard about the Heroku outage.

Everyone else will be confused about what the hell this "Heroku" thing is.

That said, if they don't use appropriate error codes (maybe 502 or 504 for Heroku issues and 503 for app issues?) they should. But I don't think error messages should mention "Heroku" by name.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#37

Post by doktrin »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #26
doktrin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I believe it certainly can matter. It may not make any difference to all clients, but some will draw a distinction between avoidable / unavoidable downtime. Rational clients understand they are not hiring demigods or living in some uptime utopia. However, they expect their service providers to adhere to best practices and make logical decisions. In this case it's Heroku, in another setting it might be a NetA…

I believe you're looking at this issue through the eyes of a technical person who understands those distinctions. There's a huge group of sites and apps catering to entirely non-technical folks to whom that distinction would only bring confusion. For a software bug tracking app, I can see why you'd want this. For a store that sells something like cloth diapers, I think it would be confusing (at absolute best) and cer…

That's correct. I certainly am not pretending to speak for all consumers in all situations, which is why I stated it can matter.

My primary point was that since it can matter, the information should be presented. An underlying assumption being that it can't hurt, but could help.

However, you brought up a point I hadn't fully considered : namely that this information could be directly confusing to some users and by extension undermine their faith in their service provider.

That said, I think the sample error message in the OP is sufficiently clear for the broad spectrum of users. Therefore, I believe presenting users with that message, or something similar, would do more good than harm.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#38

Post by abscondment »

This seems specious. Correctly assigning blame won't matter to readers; most people couldn't care less. Sticking a different brand name on the failure is side-stepping the issue: nothing stays up 100% of the time. Create a custom page that treats the situation with a little bit of levity.

If legitimate downtime happens often enough that someone would actually internalize the difference between your failures and Heroku's, you have bigger problems than your error page.

Post reply on HN