The Surreality of Website Outages
by Sapphire (June 23, 2005)
I’ve had a lot of tech issues to contend with on my sites lately (which is why I haven’t been reporting back many updates… been flitting between projects too much). And it’s all got me thinking: the human brain doesn’t have a reference point for any of this crap.
Imagine you’re driving to a shop you went to yesterday - you’ve decided to buy something you couldn’t decide about when you were there before. You arrive only to find a big pile of smithereens where the shop was yesterday. You try to stop some passersby and ask if it got hit by a tornado, or what, but they can’t hear or see you. You go to another shop.
Later, you’re driving by again, and there’s the shop. Just like it was before, only… well, that staircase on the outside of the top floor that doesn’t lead all the way to the ground seems more than a little odd, but it’s basically like it was before the Great Smithereening. You don’t even bother with the passersby this time - you just march into the shop and ask the shopkeeper what the bloody @#$^ happened? He blinks at you much like the passersby, and remarks that your shopping cart that you left here yesterday is in the side room where you left it. Have a nice day and thanks for stopping by.
That’s when you back slowly away, start pulling your hair out of your head in chunks, and let out an unearthly wail of madness. And, of course, go to a real store to buy whatever it was and say, “#$%^ shopping on the #$%^ internet!”
I know hosts aren’t perfect. I also know that to be a competent host these days, you need an understanding of Apache, MySql, php and networking and all the other standard hosting knowledge that’s been with us since the nineties. It’s a ridiculous amount of knowledge to expect anyone to have for a service that’s sold at prices ranging from $1/month to $15, tops. But what are we doing to our visitors?
Before I started running my own sites, I thought that keeping a site up and running virtually all the time took a minimum of competency and investment, so when I found a site that occasionally smithereened, I would generally give up and go to a competitor. Our visitors don’t realize how much is involved in all this. They don’t realize that one 12 year old who thinks it’s funny to write a php script that’ll crash a whole server can take out several websites and cause a lot of honest, hard-working people a lot of time and effort at cleanup.
On some of my sites, I’ve started letting visitors know sometimes when there’s been an outage - particularly one that lasted a while - and know that it’s taken care of (I hope) and give them some idea how it’s possible I’m doing all I can and it may still not be enough. I’m sure they often think, “Geez, just pay for a decent host” but it’s not that simple. I’ve seen very cheap hosts do a FABULOUS job, and I’ve seen expensive ones really create serious hassles for clients.
A few years ago, there were a lot of hosts you could use and never have a minute of downtime - but that was before php and clients installing databases on their own or via Fantastico. I’m hoping eventually some hosts will catch up with the ins and outs of all that, and we’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Until then, all we can do is decide whether or not to let visitors know, “Yes, it got all screwy, but we’re fixing it ASAP” or ignore it and hope they didn’t notice. I think they notice.
Posted in The BS Files
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