PLEASE, web hosting companies, get the point, we want constant communications, even if you have nothing new to report. WE are smart too, let us know what you're trying, what's working, what's not, maybe your USERS can help you fix the problem.
A lot of shops run with minimal staff, because -- let's face it -- cost is a very large factor of competition in the hosting industry.
Then a problem occurs, and if it were an easy problem to solve, they'd just solve it straight off and then do damage control in PR. Or, the problem is more like this one, and it requires some hard and fast thinking on the part of the staff that are available.
If you're one of those staff, the last thing you want to do is distract yourself by logging in to a forum every twenty minutes, or checking email, or writing status updates every thirty minutes. You instead feel incredible pressure to get the problem fixed immediately, meaning you don't even stop for a bathroom break if you can help it.
As a sysadmin, you'll also justify your decisions by saying that telling the users what's going on won't really change anything; it's not like they're assisting you in troubleshooting. Even if they're intelligent, they still aren't familiar with the specific systems and network topology and other good stuff involved in your operations, so you'll probably spend a lot more time answering their suggestions than you would if you just got in and figured it out yourself.
Though as a user, that kind of attitude is extremely frustrating.
It's REALLY hard, but well worth it in the end because you get praise for your communication instead of hate mail for abandoning your customers.
It doesn't help that your customers often know about issues you are having before you do. So say ~30min to get notified of an issue (Which is not unrealistic for a non obvious issue that isn't something you actively monitor) - Quick 10min investigation to assess what the scale of the issue is, another 3-5min to post a couple notifications, and that is the better part of a hour gone, and you haven't even got around to trying to come up with a fix.
EDIT: Wait? Does Slicehost not cost more? Please, correct me if I'm wrong. But from what I'm seeing you get less RAM, Bandwidth, and Space for the same price. Btw, I use Slicehost, and just recently they had problems with my server. Otherwise they're flawless though. Great support too.
They are down today, I guess, but that is to be expected for something you pay $20 a month for.
Um, ok, here's some counter-anecdotal info: My company at the time had an account on Slicehost, and every so often our instance would just go offline.
No word from anyone, just dead. After some e-mail, we learned that there was some concern of malicious activity, so the image was shutdown. Now, if Slicehost was getting complaints, and were planning on shutting down the instance, why couldn't they give some warning so some action could be taken. Or even say something right after shutting down a suspicious instance? Instead, we were left wondering why our site was not up.
I never figured out just how the instance was supposedly compromised, and eventually left Slicehost for eApps.
Nowadays I use Linode, or The Planet.
I know a few people who swear by Slicehost, but not everyone has a rosey exeperience.