Actually I do not disagree.... I make the platform choices, so i live with the results. However, IMO an error message that distinguishes between an "hosting" issue and an "app" issue is not only fair, it is in fact, meaningful data to (at least some) customers.
The people who care that it's a Heroku issue not app issue (hint: not many) have probably already heard about the Heroku outage.
Everyone else will be confused about what the hell this "Heroku" thing is.
That said, if they don't use appropriate error codes (maybe 502 or 504 for Heroku issues and 503 for app issues?) they should. But I don't think error messages should mention "Heroku" by name.
I think that's true with Heroku, but gets less true as providers get bigger. If you tell a user that your service is temporarily down "because Google is down", even a lot of regular people will know what that means, and not really blame you for it.
Not necessarily true, especially if your customers are management types looking to lay on the blame as thick as possible wherever they find it, and will terminate a relationship if they believe the service-provider is incompetent.
For those kinds of customers, they may understand what Heroku is and why their vendor is using it and will definitely make at least some distinction about outage fault.
I'm not sure about that either. If it was my product I think I'd want a polite on-brand 500 page saying my hamsters are working on it. Seeing something that suggests hosting is down doesn't frankly matter to me, even as a technical user... and to someone in between myself and my mom, with enough knowledge to understand what a "hosting company" is... I wonder if they might feel ripped off as well: "Oh great. I gave this company my money and they don't even have their own servers!"
Your customer wants to know whether it's you or Heroku because...? (There may be a legitimate business case for the distinction. Perhaps you can clarify.)
You might be providing a service to people who would like to know what part of the chain broke. If hosting company A fails all the time, and that's visible to me as a technical user of service A, I would avoid hosting company A for anything that I happen to host. I'm not the average end user, but that information is still valuable to me, and I would think less of hosting company A, instead of service A.
By Heroku not listing when its their downtime, they are insulating their reputation as a hosting company from end users, at the expense of the customers already using them. It's a little shady.
I agree that the average end user would probably not care, but most not caring does not mean it's not valuable information to some people. So I see where the original poster is coming from.
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.
I apologize if anyone felt it was abusive or insulting, it certainly wasn't intended that way. I'm very passionate about holding myself directly accountable for the entirety of my user's experience with what they paid me for. It's possible that the message suggested by the OP would improve the user's experience, but I don't see how and the OP didn't make a case for that.
Instead the article read to me as if the benefit of displaying this message is that the user's frustration might be allowed to shift to the sub-contracted vendor. I find it hard not to be infuriated by that idea.
And yeah, I think it means it's the most highly rated... or at least something very close to that.
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.
Leave it to paying customers to decide what they care about, and leave it to Heroku's paying customers to decide whether they care about the content of the error page.
I believe the key lies in the second sentence, '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"'. My mother wouldn't care whom the hosting provider is nor understand what it is.
The hard fact is that /your app is unavailable/ and I promise that >99% of users won't care why. Did anyone care why Twitter used to Failwhale? It was down, and that sucked, and software exists these days (and has for >20 years) to eliminate single point of failure.
Please take a close look at the comment you replied to and your response. I think you'll see that you're feigning outrage, in an attempt to advance your own point of view.
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
If you want to look at it that way, in most cases it's the customer's fault, because they don't want to pay what it would require to have a fully redundant system that could weather certain kinds of outages.
Bullshit again. Most customers think they have paid for a fully redundant system... unless I missed a recent wave of conversion funnels that included a message about how the reason it's only 9$ a month is because it might go down, like, whenever.
But you're right about the second part. You get what you pay for... unfortunately that's often different than getting what you bought.
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 oftentimes tell Heroku's clients to fix their app when in reality there's nothing they can do.
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".
I agree with the other commenter that the analogies are getting stretched but I'll bite:
1. You haven't paid them for anything yet.
2. Wrong question!!! It's an opportunity. If I showed up for lunch and despite power being out (probably on the entire block or neighborhood) the proprietors were set up outside making cold sandwiches next to a sign that said "Sorry, power's out so only egg salad" I'd be thrilled. Here are people single-mindedly devoted to my experience.
That's really my point. It's an attitude problem. I want to spend my money with people who hustle when it hurts, and I want to do that for my users. I'm not saying it's not "fair" to close shop and blame the other guy. Sure it's fair, but the person who cares more is gonna eat (or make, in this analogy) your lunch... and the world will be a better place for it.
>> If I showed up for lunch and despite power being out (probably on the entire block or neighborhood) the proprietors were set up outside making cold sandwiches next to a sign that said "Sorry, power's out so only egg salad" I'd be thrilled.
The relevant part of the analogy is that you, the end user, wouldn't actually know why the restaurant is closed. Could be a power outage, or it could be due to health code violations. Having this information accurately communicated to the customer could impact their willingness to return to the establishment.
Purely as a customer, I do not give a crap whether you make egg salad in an attempt to show your hustle and dedication. I am not thrilled because I do not go out for egg salad to begin with. If you are an awesome hustling entrepreneur, it does not make your egg salad taste any better to me. If the power is out, there is nothing you can do and I understand that and do not penalize you for it, if you normally provide me with good service.
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.
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.
It is their fault. The company could have used global load balancing with the app hosted in multiple geographically distributed data centers in multiple national jurisdictions through multiple independent providers. This would ensure that the earthquake which leveled Amazon's California data center and the flood which took out Hetzner's data center in Germany and the martial law declaration which took out Linode's Japanese data center and the bankruptcy which closed down Rackspace's Amsterdam data center has no operational impact on Peer1's data center in New York where the service continues uninterrupted. As the data is fully synchronized between all data centers, the company keeps running, all customers are online, and the company can work on setting up additional redundancy in a Canadian data center to make up for the others which were lost.
Yes, this costs money. It's why people accustomed to getting everything for free on the internet can't fathom why larger companies charge six or seven figures for a service that they could roll out themselves by installing an open source package on some Linode VM. If you're paying that kind of money for the reliability, it's because you're extending a promise to your end customers, and the service contract you receive from your provider should come with lots of guarantees and financial penalties if the conditions warranting the price tag aren't met.
It is absolutely your fault if the site does down due to natural disaster. This is why companies who are large enough to do so host the site at multiple locations with the ability to failover.
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 are other disasters in between this and run of the mill. Again, it's a judgement call. And it's not your "fault" if the customer wants a combination of low price and reliability, and you made a reasonable tradeoff in order to achieve it.
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.)
It is false. Most of the time, at least. But then again I wasn't expressing my opinion but a probable opinion of Your Regular Customer.
Yes, Heroku should put up a different error notification when the problem is on their side, but I doubt it would make that much of a difference in the eyes of the user.
