Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_bear | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience, users actually do care quite a bit. Back when my company was on Rackspace, we had several periods of significant downtime that weren't our fault. Customers who contacted us were very upset, but when we made it clear that it wasn't a bug with our software, but rather a problem with the hosting provider, they all calmed down. I believe there are at least a few key things a customer takes away from a message like that, even if they don't understand anything about website hosting:

1) This isn't a bug with our software. They don't need to worry about the security of their data or anything else like that.

2) There's no point in getting mad at us. Sure we chose our hosting provider, but we're just as upset about the downtime as the customer is.

3) This problem is affecting other websites as well. People seem to be better at handling stress if they think everyone else is stressed out too.

4) There's a team of professionals working on the problem. My customers know I run a small company, and they seem to appreciate knowing that a much larger company handles the hosting.

>"1) This isn't a bug with our software. They don't need to worry about the security of their data or anything else like that." So I guess no one has ever loosed up a firewall rule when something was down to try to get it back up again, providing a perfect opportunity for someone with, let's say, stolen MySQL credentials to connect to your now-exposed DB.

>"2) There's no point in getting mad at us. Sure we chose our hosting provider, but we're just as upset about the downtime as the customer is." And they're losing just as much business because /their/ site/service is now broken too. That is plenty of reason to get mad at you guys, since to them, /you are the total solution/.

>"3) This problem is affecting other websites as well. People seem to be better at handling stress if they think everyone else is stressed out too." Maybe, but then I'd just say "wow, so you have really bad planning and expect that this stuff is all very reliable then, no?" The internet goes down. Power goes out. Expect it and build around it.

>"4) There's a team of professionals working on the problem. My customers know I run a small company, and they seem to appreciate knowing that a much larger company handles the hosting." Yes, because I fully expect IBM to resolve my issue faster than a mom-and-pop store. If anything, that would make me /more/ anxious. Ever had to call Level3, Cogent, or ATT for a null route? It takes us ~1 minute and them at least 20, sometimes much longer.

I don't mean to sound snarky, but it seems like you don't deal with customers very often. You're thinking rationally when you should be thinking emotionally. Customers are hugely inconvenienced by downtime, but there's nothing to be done about it. You just need to get them to calm down and remember that you're someone they like doing business with, and this is just an unfortunate mistake that's outside of your control. Like everyone else has already mentioned, everyone knows that websites go down, so customers can deal with it as long as you give them some peace of mind[1].

Here's a related anecdote: it's common for potential customers to ask me about security before signing up. I used to actually answer them by explaining the details of our security practices, but no one understood what I was talking about. Now I tell people that the site is hosted on Amazon's servers so we can take advantage of the infrastructure they've built. Obviously this is a non-answer, but it makes people feel a lot better. They knew they wouldn't be able to evaluate our security anyway, they just wanted some sign that they can trust us (and they already trusted us because we're the only company that picks up the phone when they call).

So I guess what I'm saying is that when you're dealing with technology, it's good to be rational. When you're dealing with people, emotions are what matter.

[1] Just so you know, one other thing that I would say during the downtimes was that we were in the process of switching from Rackspace to Amazon precisely because of these problems. We weren't just sitting around accepting them. Since making the switch, the service has been rock solid, so customers know we meant what we said.

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