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I was actually a bit dissatisfied with how slicehost (part of rackspace, or at least using their DC) handled this last night. If something like this goes down,

by blhack 17y ago

I was actually a bit dissatisfied with how slicehost (part of rackspace, or at least using their DC) handled this last night. If something like this goes down, I want to know what is up within minutes of it happening. At least a "Yeah, things are going wrong. It's our fault, not yours.". I checked slicehost's website but...nothing. The only way I even knew that others were having a problem was by checking twitter. Seriously, guys...one of the things behind the pane of glass that says "break in case of emergency" needs to a sheet of paper with big red bold letters on it that says "TELL THE CUSTOMERS WHAT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW! DO NOT WAIT!" /yeah, yeah, I'm over-reacting. It's just really frustrating to be completely in the dark when something goes wrong, even if it is only for a few minutes.

brk 17y ago
Sounds good in theory... However, in a couple of my career cycles I've managed data centers and/or server farms upon which lots and lots of companies relied. Many times these unexpected outages are not always easy to diagnose even a rough root cause quickly. Sometimes you don't know if it's your issue, or an upstream issue, and so on. So, you put out a statement 5 seconds after and outage, and, oops, you misdiagnosed it. Now you get to deal with the shitty customers who want to play 1000 questions about why you told them it was a transfer switch when it turns out it was really a main breaker. Not that it matters much in the end. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't, but most of the time it's better overall to release an accurate statement later than a wrong statement early.
- lsc 17y ago
  I think "having a problem, not sure what just yet" is a perfectly acceptable thing to say.
  - blhack 17y ago
    Exactly. I liken in to twitter's failwhale. What it is telling you is that something has gone wrong, and that it has nothing to do with you.
    - brk 17y ago
      There is a significant distinction between what you would expect of a free service (Twitter) and what you would expect of a service/site you are paying money for and building your corporation upon. In both cases, I had clients that I knew were rational and logical. Those are the ones that we would issue an early release to, along the lines of "Something broke and we're on it, more info to follow". However the irrational types seemed to far outweigh the logical types. Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early. Today, I run a small bit of a data center as one of my personal side-project companies. I only accept low-overhead experienced clients. They don't give me a lot of headaches, and the 1 single time we had an issue (power related, natch) I told them about it as soon as I found out and thing was a completely forgettable experience for everyone.
      - moe 17y ago
        Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early My expirience is the opposite. All customers I have dealt with were very happy to receive an acknowledgement early and a post-mortem analysis later. Most customers don't care one bit about what is wrong, they care about when their service will be restored. Knowing "they are working on it" is already one step up from "Does this affect only me? Have they even noticed, yet?".
martey 17y ago
Slicehost seems to understand that it failed in the keeping-customers-informed area: http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/11/4/let-s-talk-about-the-dfw-power-outage http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/11/4/let-s-talk-about...

by blhack 17y ago

brk 17y ago

Sounds good in theory... However, in a couple of my career cycles I've managed data centers and/or server farms upon which lots and lots of companies relied. Many times these unexpected outages are not always easy to diagnose even a rough root cause quickly. Sometimes you don't know if it's your issue, or an upstream issue, and so on. So, you put out a statement 5 seconds after and outage, and, oops, you misdiagnosed it. Now you get to deal with the shitty customers who want to play 1000 questions about why you told them it was a transfer switch when it turns out it was really a main breaker. Not that it matters much in the end. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't, but most of the time it's better overall to release an accurate statement later than a wrong statement early.

lsc 17y ago
I think "having a problem, not sure what just yet" is a perfectly acceptable thing to say.
- blhack 17y ago
  Exactly. I liken in to twitter's failwhale. What it is telling you is that something has gone wrong, and that it has nothing to do with you.
  - brk 17y ago
    There is a significant distinction between what you would expect of a free service (Twitter) and what you would expect of a service/site you are paying money for and building your corporation upon. In both cases, I had clients that I knew were rational and logical. Those are the ones that we would issue an early release to, along the lines of "Something broke and we're on it, more info to follow". However the irrational types seemed to far outweigh the logical types. Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early. Today, I run a small bit of a data center as one of my personal side-project companies. I only accept low-overhead experienced clients. They don't give me a lot of headaches, and the 1 single time we had an issue (power related, natch) I told them about it as soon as I found out and thing was a completely forgettable experience for everyone.
    - moe 17y ago
      Those are the ones where I can tell you from my own first hand experience that overall you are better off giving accurate information late than wrong or incomplete information early My expirience is the opposite. All customers I have dealt with were very happy to receive an acknowledgement early and a post-mortem analysis later. Most customers don't care one bit about what is wrong, they care about when their service will be restored. Knowing "they are working on it" is already one step up from "Does this affect only me? Have they even noticed, yet?".

martey 17y ago

Slicehost seems to understand that it failed in the keeping-customers-informed area: http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/11/4/let-s-talk-about-the-dfw-power-outage http://www.slicehost.com/articles/2009/11/4/let-s-talk-about...