I experienced my first major downtime with this site last night. There was a power failure at DreamHost’s data center, which fried some of their hardware. When I went to bed last night, the site was still down; it was back up when I took a look this morning, it was back up, but apparently there was another power failure this morning.
Predictably, customer reactions to this have fallen into two categories: they have a lot of irate people leaving nasty messages on their status site and planning to leave, and then there are the customers who are willing to take a wait and see approach.
I am not a big proponent of yelling and screaming, for two reasons. First, back in the days when I was running a photo lab, occasionally the machines would misbehave. Or occasionally, at my current job, there will be a problem with the software, and sites will go down. I’ve been the guy trying to fix things while people are clamoring for things to be fixed, and I’m well aware that yelling and screaming doesn’t help. Pressuring the people who are trying to solve things won’t help them and may be a distraction.
Secondly, it’s easy for me to take this attitude because my living doesn’t depend on this site. But if it did, I surely wouldn’t have gone with a $10 a month hosting company. You do get what you pay for. Extra redundancy, extra power systems, extra servers, extra etc all cost… extra.
This is not to say that if there were ongoing issues, I wouldn’t make a move. There are always limits on one’s patience. But stuff does happen.
Update 3/24/2013:
They’ve credited me for a month’s worth of hosting for the downtime.