My webhost had a bad day. They ran a regular, normal, upgrade to some switches and a switch failed. It decided it would be fun to reboot over and over. Since running on one switch is rather dangerous, they decided to roll back so we could have two and everything would be okay. It didn’t work. In fact, nothing worked. It was one of those days where you put out a fire only to have an earthquake, and as soon as you got the place cleaned up there was a flood. And then the sprinklers thought they should go off.
We have, every last one of is, had a day like that. A day where absolutely everything went wrong when it was possible to do so. It was clearly one of those days.
I can certainly complain that my host wasn’t really the best when it came to explaining things, too. They would send us emails, which was fine, except my emails were on my server which was inaccessible to me. So many people went to their live-chat that it was impossible to get a rep. Tweets? Unanswerable due to volume. They actually replied by (heh) email. And when I went to their management panel on their website, it just said that it would be updated in ‘an hour.’
I resorted to opening a ticket. And I hated doing it, since I knew better than many exactly how shitty their say was. So I asked “Status Update?” and explained that I was unable to check my email but what was the status? I got the form replies, which I expected, and I pushed back for one detail. Just one:
“It is our aim to have this completed within the next hour by proceeding with this fix immediately.”
Hour from when?
Suggestion for your website: Can you timestamp things so we know when to kind of expect things?
By the end of that day, they had a static.html page with the information, and times(!), on it. They’re not ‘great’ at keeping it updated, but I know how annoying that aspect is, and I don’t fault them one bit. Once the work was done and everything was back to normal, I inquired as to the offered credit, which actually I’d forgotten about but they had mentioned to me in the support ticket! I think it works out to being about $4, clearly not very much, and honestly I don’t care about it very much.
A thought that never crossed my mind? Leaving them.
It’s not because my server’s been there for over a decade, and it’s not because I like the more and more ‘grown up’ corporate tone of their communications. It’s certainly not that I agree with everything they do. But what I do agree with is that I pay them for a service and, for the most part, I get it. When I don’t, after the dust settles, they’re as responsive as every other host.
I’m not paying them just for server space, after all. I pay for backups, some cloud services, and most of all, I’m paying them for help when I screw up. Not to be my consultants, certainly, but I do pay them for technical support and advice like “Can you tell me how to install Ruby on my server?” because there’s no KB article … yet. Also when I needed help tuning httpd.conf they helped out. They don’t do the work for me, they do their limit, and they’re generally friendly about it.
So how bad does an incident have to be to make me leave it?
I’ve only ever left a host when they didn’t offer the services I needed (SQL, PHP 5, so on and so forth). If I was paying less for a bare-bones host, I’d have to pay someone to help me with server stuff anyway, so for me the all-in-one matters.
As for outages, I’m pretty relaxed about it, At an hour of downtime, I pay attention. I had a total of about 4 hours over the course of a day, which is annoying, and bad, but not horrible because no content was lost, just traffic. It’s not that my website isn’t my life, it’s that I’m realistic about situations. If the host explains what happened and are working on fix it as fast as is reasonably possible, I’ll suffer up to 6 straight hours before getting really upset. I’ve never had an outage of more than 75 minutes in a row, though, and before this one, I never had one more than 45. So yes, this was the worst outage I’ve ever had with them (that wasn’t my fault).
Other incidents that may make me leave would be a deletion of my server without warning. That, hands down, is time to go. Any service promise that isn’t regularly met is grounds for a chat about expectations. I don’t count ‘support response time’ as a service promise, mind you, since when shit gets bad, that’s always going to drop. I mean things like backups or uptime. I’ve never been one to care about 99% uptime, but if the server’s always crashing no matter what I do, and they’re not willing to help me, then I have a problem. In general, I feel that if my site in particular is having issues, it’s probably me and my snowflake more than them. If all sites have the same problem, then it’s probably our needs don’t match the host services.
The funny thing is I don’t know of many hosts that fits that bill. Sometimes a host has to tell you no, they can’t offer a service, and sometimes they tell you that you’ll have to pay more to do something. But in general, most hosts want to keep you, they want to help you, and they sometimes have to be the bearer of bad news. I’ve actually met hosts who have told me “We won’t be able to provide you the quality of uptime you need due to the way your site is being accessed.” That was a fancy way to say “You get too much traffic for our small node to handle.” And then they handed me a discount for another host. Another Host. This small host was bought out years ago, but I will always remember Greg for that moment. He was awesome.
My point is that it’s not my host’s job to manage my website, so if I let the spam on my site go wild and it causes my server to crash, well that was my fault. Not theirs. Don’t like the way my plugins make my site work? That’s on me. And if they tell me “You’re getting hit by Reddit, we need to increase your CPU/memory to handle it, and that will cost you more money” I know they’re not just upselling me.
There are some hosts, sure, out to make a buck, but in general I find that if they know that I understand our relationship, things go well.
This isn’t meant to be a love song to any one host. None of them are perfect, and they all have weird quirks. This is a love song about remembering my relationship with my host, respecting that, and holding up my end of the deal. I’m not naming any host names (even though it would take you about 2 seconds to sort out who mine is, and who I work for, and yes, I’m ecstatic about both), because it doesn’t matter. I’ve had an experience like this with hosts that are maligned and vilified. My choice not to use them is not based on quality of service but on my morals and ethics. I chose not to fund people I am diametrically opposed to, for my own peace of mind.
But I find, for the most part, that when I make it clear I know how our relationship works, and better yet, I know how their job works, I get both the support I want and the results I expect. It’s funny how that goes. They keep my faith and I keep trusting them.
Comments
6 responses to “When Sites Go Down”
WOW you have a way with words i would have dumped the “host” a long time ago, it almost sounds like the days when i had my “Dedicated Server” and i must say never again, i have moved over to X and i never have any crap at all, all they do is host WordPress and not anything else and each of the support team are like you and me WordPress Freaks.
Sometimes it is time to move on 🙂
Any way Good Luck
Your SA Friend Mark
@Mark de Scande: The situation was, to me at least, very obvious that it was a horrible, bad, day that could have happened to any host, anywhere. Hardware fails. And while we all try to make things work so we have failbacks, the reality is we never fully stress test them until we’re on them, because it’s nearly impossible to do so.
They handled it well, they were apologetic, and they did, indeed, fix everything.
Yeah, everyone’s allowed the odd bad day in my book.
As you say there are the good, bad and the ugly hosts. There are the hosts that used to be good until they were acquired and got run into the ground. All of them, even the ones I can’t stand working with, try to do their best, I believe. Some are just challenged because they are trying to do too much with too little. And I certainly believe that it’s all too often the support folks who are caught in the middle between customers and corporate decisions!
But you do remind me of something that I tell my clients and that I pay far too little attention to myself. (What? Do as I say, not as I do??? LOL)
When setting up a website that will have associated email addresses, it really behooves oneself to use an email address for the account that doesn’t use an email address from the account. Use a gmail address or some other “neutral” email addy. Should your account go totally wonky at least your hosting company would be still able to contact you and you’d not be in the Catch 22 of “My account’s broken and they can’t contact me because my account’s broken.”
As always Mika, great food for thought!
Ken
@Ken: Oooohhh the email thing.
Here’s what’s funny. My gmail forwards to my regular mail. I can pop in and check, but I have a great antipathy to ‘free’ email and relying on them. That said, I could have called, but in all cases, having a status page solves all the issues because people won’t HAVE to check email/call/open tickets if their email is down (technically it was up, I just couldn’t get to it). PLUS if you’re not sending emails to a couple thousand people in a data center, you save yourself some headaches.
You know on the one hand I think you raise a very good point that outages alone are not a good reason to leave a host… not necessarily. The one thing that I would like to see from a lot more hosts, though (something you didn’t mention explicitly so I hope you don’t mind if I suggest its place here) is open, honest, no BS communication when something goes wrong.
I’m not gonna name names either, but I imagine we’ve both had experiences where a host or a service went down and the provider sent a plain-language follow up to explain what happened, what the impact was, what the impact wasn’t, and what they’re going to do differently next time.
I imagine we’ve also had experiences with hosts or other service providers in which there is no follow up at all, or the explanation borders on Shaggy-like evasion — “yes there was a problem, but it wasn’t our fault, nothing we could have done to prevent it.”
Mistakes happen. I make them all the time. And I’ve also got a pretty wide band of patience for anyone who’s honest about their own and confident enough to admit them and apologize for them… this is especially true with web hosts (or similar technology providers)
Just a thought…. but for me, definitely, a little bit of downtime is acceptable, especially if the provider is forthright and sincere when they follow up about the topic. The second I get a “Some strange act of god that we could never have prevented oh hells bells and Godzilla attacking our servers” -type email (and I’ve received several like that) I pretty much start looking for another provider immediately.
@Evan Volgas: Oh I agree!
Unless the outage was related to a security issue that is not SAFE to explain at this time (like, say, we were the first target in a backdoor heartbleed-type attack, and we wanted to work with everyone to get patched BEFORE disclosing) then yes, everyone should be transparent. Bugs the HELL out of me, and I’m glad my company does, for the most part, explain in detail why stupid things happen.
Mind you, that didn’t help anyone when we explained “Dude, the power was OUT for half of the damn state!” That’s really totally, 100%, out of the control of a host. If the power is out, we can hope all our failover switches do what they’re supposed to, but …
(And if Godzilla actually does attack, my server is named Mothra… I’m doomed!)