Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.
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.
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.
Delusional. If it's down, it's done, and unless your product is a developer tool, >99% of people won't care why.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless the error message is a slightly-less-functional app, no.
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.
You get what you pay for.
But you're right about the second part. You get what you pay for... unfortunately that's often different than getting what you bought.
Devs don't get that UX is all that matters for most software.
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.
> "...in reality there's nothing they can do."
This is not a reality I'm familiar with.
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.
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.
I go someplace outside of the power failure
I agree with the content of the article, but you're right -- users don't wanna hear it.
The information is useful. Heroku should provide it. We're done here.
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.
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.)
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.
That's all.
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.
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.