Public availability status
No one is perfect.
Web services go down or go awry. Though what I really loathe is when administrators don’t share that information. Two services I use often are on that shitlist. Flickr and Google. Let me share my experience with Google:
- I notice something does not work like it was before
- Go through their help system
- Perhaps try a search and fail to find what I need
- Look at forums
- Ponder about posting to the forum, decide against it
- Send a mail/feedback (which can be really hard to find)
- Get an impersonal blanket response
- Later, get a email from Google whether the response was helpful or not… grrr
- End up just waiting and retrying again later at some random time
Kudos to Flickr in sense I’ve actually got to speak to a human in this regard. Though all that person did was say sorry and try again later. What Google and Flickr both need sorely is a public status page reporting outages.
Dreamhost do it right with DreamHost status.
Except when Dreamhost posts about machines that I don’t use. It could be a lot better, though if I was using some powerful RSS aggregator I could perhaps filter it.
I know it might look bad to maintain “public availability status” and it could reflect badly on your stock price in the short term. I urge you to think long term and build trust with your customers. Dreamhost went through a rough patch recently and I stuck with them because they seemingly tried their best to make their problems they were experiencing public.