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Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
101–110 of 139 posts
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#102Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.
you're missing the point what OP is complaining about is that when Heroku has an outage it says that there's an error within the client's application. I agree that it's the client's responsibility to have an up-and-running app, while the average user doesn't really care what's going on behind the scene, in this case Heroku is still giving out factually wrong and misleading information. I can imagine users will oftent…
I don't think so. I think you're missing the point. I think the point is that there is an error in the application. Heroku is part of the application, and the customer doesn't care. If you extend your line of thinking then you could put up error messages like "We're sorry, but this gosh darn database driver has totally let us down but we didn't write it so go complain to the people who did".
> "...in reality there's nothing they can do."
This is not a reality I'm familiar with.
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#103Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#104This 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…
This is BS. Your users DO care.
When our service is down for some reason, the ONLY question we get (like this one we got today) is - "Has the service been down recently? If so, no worries - it happens, just wanted to report and see if this is temporary or if it is just me."
Having a "holy shit our entire service is down" message means your users dont' have to ask "is it just me?".
That's a big difference. It has nothing to do with shifting blame, it's about keeping your users informed. Information makes people happy.
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#105Many companies I know would immediately fire a service provider for ever disclosing their existence to an end customer. If anything, Heroku's customers should be able to replace the default error message such that it conforms to the the customer's site branding.
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#106From a customer's perspective, there are only two parties in their relationship with you: you, and them. When something goes wrong with your application, you either accept the blame, or you make the customers feel like they broke something. To the average user, seeing an error message like "heroku is down" (or any other jargon) leaves the possibility that they might have broken something, and the failure is on their end. The end result of this interaction is that your software has made your user feel bad about themselves. This is not a way to get your users to return to you.
Heroku's error message could be friendlier, but it currently contains only words that any user can understand, which reassures your customers that even though the service they are looking for is unavailable, there is nothing they could have done to improve the situation. Your customers might leave with a lowered opinion of your service, but your app doesn't make them feel ashamed of themselves, which is a much better outcome.
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#107This 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…
This is BS. Your users DO care. When our service is down for some reason, the ONLY question we get (like this one we got today) is - "Has the service been down recently? If so, no worries - it happens, just wanted to report and see if this is temporary or if it is just me." Having a "holy shit our entire service is down" message means your users dont' have to ask "is it just me?". That's a big difference. It has noth…
Yes, information does make people happy. And my point is that a message that says "this site is hosted at Heroku" gives absolutely zero information to the vast majority of internet users. Most people simply don't know what that phrase means. It's no different than if someone suggested a new feature that is only visible for Opera users. It's just a waste of time and effort to do something that caters to such a small sliver of the market.
Also, a Heroku-specific error page would give zero help to the problem you describe above. Anecdotal evidence in this thread suggests Heroku sometimes goes down briefly for small chunks of its users. So if you see the Heroku error, it could be for just you. Or it could be system-wide outage. It wouldn't even solve that problem!
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#108This 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…
> If you had a setup with a hosted machine at Rackspace and the power goes out, you don't expect a custom error. So why would you expect one from Heroku?
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"No matter what actually happened, you should've been prepared." This is just plain false. Being prepared comes at a cost. If you over-prepare, then your customers have to pay more for no good reason, and they don't necessarily want to. You have to draw a line and make a judgement call. There are such things as natural (or political) disasters so serious that it would be extremely stupid to plan for them. And there a…
As long as you are being honest with your customer and explain this somewhere.
The problem is one of expectations, if you don't say anywhere what have you prepared for and what are you going to do when something you didn't prepare for happens, you are misleading the customer, as they will rightly assume you have prepared for most ordinary things (heroku outage, for instance.)
Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…
#110Why 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)…
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…
Heroku going down isn't unavoidable downtime. It's clownshoes downtime.