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

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

#51
post #45

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

Continue in that vein, then if there is a natural disaster then it is their fault as well. The information is useful. Heroku should provide it. We're done here.

[deleted]

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

#52
Heroku isn't for apps that can't stand downtime. My experience has been that if you have 2-3 heroku apps, and you monitor them with a 3rd party tool, you'll see random "server not found" behavior every few weeks. (And no, they're not just timing out from dyno spinup). Usually this isn't a system wide outage and never gets mentioned on their status page.

So only use heroku if:

a) Uptime is non-critical & you just don't want to deal with setting up a server b) Uptime is non-critical & You don't know how to set up a server

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

#53
post #22
post #15

I don't think the OP is right in general. What if your customer sees Heroku's name, and gets confused? She starts asking questions like: Who is on the other end? Am I in business with X or with Heroku? Who should i call?

This is actually a really good point. I can't find it now, but there's an article floating around somewhere about a government employee in some small town accusing Apache or Debian or some project of being "hackers" because his web server broke and was showing the default "congrats it works!" page instead of the town web site.

That's why Apache's default page is now It works!.

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

#54

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

True, though the dev has the same relationship with Heroku.

I agree with the content of the article, but you're right -- users don't wanna hear it.

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

#55

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…

#56

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)…

Suppose some of your customers see an error message and report it. You could deliver valuable uptime to them that much faster when you know it's a bug in your code and not Heroku.

When you know it's Heroku, you can deliver valuable uptime to your customers faster because you don't have to spend time testing for bugs and checking server logs--jumping straight to what you would do: contacting Heroku.

Your customers won't be just as screwed--3 hours of down is not the same as 6 hours of down.

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

#58
post #45

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

Continue in that vein, then if there is a natural disaster then it is their fault as well. The information is useful. Heroku should provide it. We're done here.

Customers usually don't care about the reason for outage. They gave you money. If the service is running, good. If it's not, you screwed up. No matter what actually happened, you should've been prepared. Sad but true.

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

#59
post #45

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

Continue in that vein, then if there is a natural disaster then it is their fault as well. The information is useful. Heroku should provide it. We're done here.

I totally agree with you (the first part). It's all calculated risk, and evaluation of cost.. you keep it up when the math works out. If it's down and it hurts your customers to the point that they'll walk.. it's on you. Bad math, your problem.

I speak as someone who's worked primarily in healthcare building services where I assure you we held ourselves personally responsible for natural disasters.

So it depends on your app. If my startup lets people take photos of their dessert and paste lolcats on them, then maybe my hosting goes down and I show my users a page that says the server must have farted, who cares.. but the last thing I'd do is show a page that said the people I pay with their money must be fucking up at the moment and we'll all wait together for things to get better.

Point is: My users are not my peers, they're my responsibility and livelihood. Even when something totally out of my control occurs. Fuck, especially when something out of my control occurs.

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

#60

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

not always true, as a freelance dev I tend to give options to my clients so they end up owning their hosting, something happens I'm authorized to get in and contact support, but I always make it clear to them they are responsible for it
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