5 ms·

The people at my office who actually use Highrise and have to deal with 37s' frequent bouts of downtime would beg to differ.

roel_v 16y ago
Exactly. I don't see how a company that sells business-critical (I assume) software can so proudly proclaim that they don't care all that much about downtime. He does say 'we're still here', so yeah probably for them it doesn't matter. They're mostly great at marketing anyway. But for any service, to fail on me 5 minutes before my presentation starts and I just want to look up the customer's name and position again, and then finding out that you can't access your data - that'd be enough to dump them the next day for me.
- jrockway 16y ago
  that'd be enough to dump them the next day for me You can't dump them if they're down!
  - anthonyb 16y ago
    I think your credit card company might beg to differ on that one...
lsb 16y ago
As long as they're paying 37s, 37s is happy, and they're evidently happy enough with the service to keep paying.
jshen 16y ago
98% or 99% uptime isn't good enough for the people you know? Or are you suggesting that their uptime is significantly lower than that?
- true_religion 16y ago
  1% of a year is 3.65242199 days. So on the extreme end 37signals could be down for over 3 days in a single bout and still have 99% uptime. 3 days downtime is serious. However, this case is unlikely. Also unlikely is a scenario where they are down for the same time each day---14.4 minutes @ 99% uptime. Its most likely that they're down for a few minutes here and there across the day during working hours, which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. You can never just click a button and know your form will be submitted.
  - jshen 16y ago
    Yes, but there are a some more nuances. I'll bet a fair amount of downtime is scheduled, and would be scheduled for low usage periods. Second, most services I've ever used with an SLA for n sixes hasn't actually lived up to that SLA. Instead they offer you a prorated charge for that month or something similar. What people promise in an SLA and what they deliver are very different things. I'd be very interested in some stats about historic uptimes for similar sites. Also, how much more are you willing to pay for an extra 9 of uptime?
- Silhouette 16y ago
  98% uptime is equivalent to being down for an entire week every year, or half an hour every day. The article contrasted Wal-Mart (massive e-commerce operation) with things like Delicious/Technorati (casual services, usually free to use). It conveniently glossed over the middle ground, where 37 Signals' applications and many others live. FWIW, I did look into using some of 37 Signals' services for my small businesses. They failed my assessment on several counts and we found other solutions. But judging by their blog posts etc, they seem to be proud of several of the things that caused me to look elsewhere. As long as their marketing is good enough to maintain their business success regardless of any technical merit, I suppose I can't argue with their commercial position and I assume they accept that people like me will never use them.
  - spitfire 16y ago
    Which other solutions? I'm currently looking for tools - right now a mac mini running osx server seems the way to go. But it's missing some stuff, what have you found?
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      > But it's missing some stuff, what have you found? The bottom line is, we didn't. Most of these business admin services seem to offer little more than a very simple database, a pretty UI, and a monthly bill. We write software for a living ourselves, so producing an in-house bug tracker or CRM system or project dashboard takes a matter of hours, maybe a few days if we add more power to it later. It's only worth outsourcing the tools if the relatively small amount of time it saves us outweighs the many downsides: time lost to set up and maintain an external system, monthly cash cost to use it, having to fit our process around their tool instead of the other way around, interoperability issues if tools have related purposes but data is locked in, relying on external infrastructure for access, etc. etc. That is only going to happen if the outsourced service offers a silky smooth set-up process, a tool that can be readily adjusted to our exact needs and still present a streamlined UI to match, immediate and convenient access to all the underlying data, and very low pricing, among other things. That's a pretty tall order, and frankly, none of the services we looked at seemed to be anywhere close. We do use external software to run things like mail and web servers, but it's standard stuff running on our own boxes. We are also looking at external services for tasks that are much more difficult/expensive to implement ourselves, such as payment processing and off-site back-up. But for basic business admin, things like bug tracking, project planning, CRM and the like, we concluded that it wasn't even worth looking at the freebie software projects that do it. In the time it would take to properly evaluate a few of them and determine whether they could meet our needs, plus the time to customise them to do so, we could have just written exactly what we wanted from scratch.
te_chris 16y ago
I'm assuming that, given the article is from '05, attitudes there have changed a bit (one would hope).

roel_v 16y ago

Exactly. I don't see how a company that sells business-critical (I assume) software can so proudly proclaim that they don't care all that much about downtime. He does say 'we're still here', so yeah probably for them it doesn't matter. They're mostly great at marketing anyway. But for any service, to fail on me 5 minutes before my presentation starts and I just want to look up the customer's name and position again, and then finding out that you can't access your data - that'd be enough to dump them the next day for me.

jrockway 16y ago
that'd be enough to dump them the next day for me You can't dump them if they're down!
- anthonyb 16y ago
  I think your credit card company might beg to differ on that one...

lsb 16y ago

As long as they're paying 37s, 37s is happy, and they're evidently happy enough with the service to keep paying.

jshen 16y ago

98% or 99% uptime isn't good enough for the people you know? Or are you suggesting that their uptime is significantly lower than that?

true_religion 16y ago
1% of a year is 3.65242199 days. So on the extreme end 37signals could be down for over 3 days in a single bout and still have 99% uptime. 3 days downtime is serious. However, this case is unlikely. Also unlikely is a scenario where they are down for the same time each day---14.4 minutes @ 99% uptime. Its most likely that they're down for a few minutes here and there across the day during working hours, which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. You can never just click a button and know your form will be submitted.
- jshen 16y ago
  Yes, but there are a some more nuances. I'll bet a fair amount of downtime is scheduled, and would be scheduled for low usage periods. Second, most services I've ever used with an SLA for n sixes hasn't actually lived up to that SLA. Instead they offer you a prorated charge for that month or something similar. What people promise in an SLA and what they deliver are very different things. I'd be very interested in some stats about historic uptimes for similar sites. Also, how much more are you willing to pay for an extra 9 of uptime?
Silhouette 16y ago
98% uptime is equivalent to being down for an entire week every year, or half an hour every day. The article contrasted Wal-Mart (massive e-commerce operation) with things like Delicious/Technorati (casual services, usually free to use). It conveniently glossed over the middle ground, where 37 Signals' applications and many others live. FWIW, I did look into using some of 37 Signals' services for my small businesses. They failed my assessment on several counts and we found other solutions. But judging by their blog posts etc, they seem to be proud of several of the things that caused me to look elsewhere. As long as their marketing is good enough to maintain their business success regardless of any technical merit, I suppose I can't argue with their commercial position and I assume they accept that people like me will never use them.
- spitfire 16y ago
  Which other solutions? I'm currently looking for tools - right now a mac mini running osx server seems the way to go. But it's missing some stuff, what have you found?
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    > But it's missing some stuff, what have you found? The bottom line is, we didn't. Most of these business admin services seem to offer little more than a very simple database, a pretty UI, and a monthly bill. We write software for a living ourselves, so producing an in-house bug tracker or CRM system or project dashboard takes a matter of hours, maybe a few days if we add more power to it later. It's only worth outsourcing the tools if the relatively small amount of time it saves us outweighs the many downsides: time lost to set up and maintain an external system, monthly cash cost to use it, having to fit our process around their tool instead of the other way around, interoperability issues if tools have related purposes but data is locked in, relying on external infrastructure for access, etc. etc. That is only going to happen if the outsourced service offers a silky smooth set-up process, a tool that can be readily adjusted to our exact needs and still present a streamlined UI to match, immediate and convenient access to all the underlying data, and very low pricing, among other things. That's a pretty tall order, and frankly, none of the services we looked at seemed to be anywhere close. We do use external software to run things like mail and web servers, but it's standard stuff running on our own boxes. We are also looking at external services for tasks that are much more difficult/expensive to implement ourselves, such as payment processing and off-site back-up. But for basic business admin, things like bug tracking, project planning, CRM and the like, we concluded that it wasn't even worth looking at the freebie software projects that do it. In the time it would take to properly evaluate a few of them and determine whether they could meet our needs, plus the time to customise them to do so, we could have just written exactly what we wanted from scratch.

te_chris 16y ago

I'm assuming that, given the article is from '05, attitudes there have changed a bit (one would hope).