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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…

#71

Post by Kroem3r »

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.

This is a poor response: Abusive, insulting and makes only a token effort to advance the discussion. Does the fact that it sits at the top of the page mean that it's the most highly rated?

And in practical terms, it seems totally theoretical.

In my experience, more information is always valuable. It's not a matter of shifting responsibility, it's a matter of understanding what the problem is and efficiently getting it resolved.

Sending out an error that is incorrect is wrong -- both a theoretical and practical observation.

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

#72

Post by balloot »

chao- wrote: post #24

As someone who was inconvenienced by the outage, and with no mitigation strategy in place, I DON'T blame Heroku. The weight is placed squarely on me (lone tech in our company) for not having researched how to distribute services alongside Heroku, or fall back to something else, or whatever the proper term is. I've been googling like mad since this morning, finding a few mostly-unanswered StackOverflow questions and a…

How do you not blame Heroku? You are paying them a good chunk of money to handle not only hosting, but failover strategies, multiple locations, etc. If you have to worry about any of those things they aren't doing their job.

That's like if you chose MySQL as the database, and then when an update had a huge bug that broke your site, you say "totally my fault that I don't have a version of the site that uses PostgreSQL."

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

#73

Post by ahelwer »

ams6110 wrote: post #68
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.

When you go to a restaurant to get lunch, and they are closed due to a power failure, do you blame them?

I don't want to start a whole "actually, it's more like x analogy" thread, but really, there are gaping fundamental holes when applying yours to the situation.

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

#75

Post by kingofspain »

glesica wrote: post #22
Maro wrote: 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.

An ex-boss accused me of hacking and embezzlement(!) when he discovered he was paying £10/month for DNS services a few years back. It was something in place from years before I even started!

He also flipped out over firewall issues on his new Macbook (the site is down and taken the internet with it!) and problems with his ISP (some weird adult filter).

Point is, some people expect a site to be a single atomic thing with no dependencies or connections between. Through anything "unusual" in there and confusion and chaos reigns. My ex-boss was somewhat extreme I admit, but I've experienced it to a lesser degree many many times.

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

#76

Post by danilocampos »

Kroem3r wrote: post #71
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.

This is a poor response: Abusive, insulting and makes only a token effort to advance the discussion. Does the fact that it sits at the top of the page mean that it's the most highly rated? And in practical terms, it seems totally theoretical. In my experience, more information is always valuable. It's not a matter of shifting responsibility, it's a matter of understanding what the problem is and efficiently getting i…

woooosh

OP was playing the role of the user. Paying customers don't care about the implementation details of the products they pay for. They only care about whether or not they work.

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

#78

Post by smokeyj »

balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

My only gripe with the heroku app error page is it doesn't show your companies branding. I would like to be able to upload a static fail page with a generic message for my customers. Heck, let me specify a URL to redirect to when Heroku crashes.

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

#79

Post by bapbap »

smokeyj wrote: post #78
balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

My only gripe with the heroku app error page is it doesn't show your companies branding. I would like to be able to upload a static fail page with a generic message for my customers. Heck, let me specify a URL to redirect to when Heroku crashes.

This might help:

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages#customize_...

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

#80

Post by Goladus »

smokeyj wrote: post #78
balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

My only gripe with the heroku app error page is it doesn't show your companies branding. I would like to be able to upload a static fail page with a generic message for my customers. Heck, let me specify a URL to redirect to when Heroku crashes.

That was my first through as well. I was thinking "why is this author demanding that Heroku put their brand on his app's error messages?"
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