As for 37signals, I think that if they’re blaming their service provider, as Fitz points out, they’re to blame for putting all their eggs in one basket - albeit a generally big, protective basket in Rackspace, but a single point of failure nonetheless. Even in DHH’s comments on TechCrunch he admits that Rackspace’s hardware agreement has long since been broken. Umm, I’m not a smart man, but if that’s the case, um, why are you still with them (and since you are, why aren’t you mirroring crap?)Without either a backup service, or a Google Gears type of app, they’re the ones to blame. Hopefully, the customer can see this. ;)

I think that having frustrations with vendors is totally part of the game. It happens to everyone. It is just a bummer that people are so into passing the blame onto someone else - instead of taking responsibility.

i think that blaming is easy and a bit thoughtless - whereas taking responsibility is usually hard and possibly shows weakness (because it is YOUR fault instead of someone else).

but yea. rackspace has had a couple rough spots with us too. but they are always quickly resolved and remedied within a day at the most. and usually they do not cause downtime. so regardless of tumblr and 37signals bitching about how bad it is. i will also continue to represent them in anyway i can.

The transformer thing was a totally separate issue, and it sounds like Rackspace hadn’t been keeping up with their backup systems to make sure they were working properly. Hopefully they learned their lesson, and I won’t discredit them unless it happens again.

I’ve had my own frustrations with Rackspace, but after the fact they’ve always gone out of their way to fix the problem. I still refer people to them on a regular basis, and will continue to do so in spite of the 37s/tumblr nonsense.

I agree - at some point we do have to trust someone to do their job - and i agree that it is a harrowing experience to have to tell your clients that something is broken. however i don’t agree that you need to get into specifics of what is broken and who is going to fix it. because - in the long run - it is the company who is choosing vendors and if the vendor fails - i would go as far as saying that it is the companies fault for choosing a faulty vendor. Or at least not making sure that the vendor is doing it right/having backups and redundancy.

Whenever i have had large failures. I have tried to apoligize in the following form:

Dear users. I am sorry for the downtime. We are working hard to fix it. I am sorry for any problems this has causes.

However - tumblr and 37signals seem to say stuff like:

Dear users. Somebody caused us some problems and they are doing a poor job of fixing it fast. I am sorry for any problems this has causes.

Those two statements are VERY different. Which would you rather hear as a consumer? I would rather hear the first one.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation - as a service provider trying to get customers back up and as a customer at the mercy of a service provider. There isn’t a worse feeling in the world than having to tell your customers you know what the problem is, but someone else has to fix it.

37signals accepted full responsibility and explained what happened. At some point we all have to trust someone else to do *their* job, sadly they appear to have been let down.

Obviously this is what you mean by ‘black box’. So yeah. I agree. Take responsibility for yourself.