Recent site outages or: How I learned to stop worrying and love DreamHost
For those of you that visit my site more than once per month, you’ve probably noticed site slowness and downtime over the last few weeks. Frustrating to say the least… My web host (DreamHost) has been experiencing the sort of bad luck that you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone — you know the kind that keeps coming, multiple times over the course of a few weeks?
Much of their problems had to do with the recent heatwave (and poor contingency planning), which has caused brownouts in L.A. and even the infamous MySpace outage a few weekends ago. The problems with my sites have been so consistent and frustrating over the last few weeks that I was considering moving all of my sites (probably five in all) to a new host.
That was until I stumbled upon Seth Godin’s post on how DreamHost dealt with the fiasco, which led me to the DreamHost blog post on the situation. I’ve (infrequently) read the DreamHost blog in the past and am currently subscribed to their status RSS feed and monthly newsletter, so I know they are good communicators. However, the level of detail and honesty in their story was very refreshing (and rare) to see on a corporate blog. Especially one that sells uptime and, without a doubt, angered a good chunk of their customer base with all their recent problems.
The most telling part is the reaction to their story (see the comments on the DreamHost blog linked above), which has been more than accepting — even understanding. It just goes to show you that honesty is the best policy. If you make a mistake, admit it, explain the situation, and apologize sincerely. Reassure your customers (or whomever) that you know what happened and that you are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Then deliver. That’s all they want to hear. People understand that things happen, so why hide the truth?
Now if we could only get folks in D.C. (and governments around the world, actually) to follow this kind of example, we might be working our way toward a better world.
