This is the kind of cleverness that I don’t think many people appreciate in people they are paying. I’m interested in getting the best service I can, not getting the “best deal”.

Look, I run some websites, too. I understand that sometimes bad things happen and sometimes even good websites go down. But when I use a website, and when I pay for a website especially, it makes me feel better about problems when the people running the site at least apologize. Fundamentally, I’m not relying on the feedlounge code, or some set of machines, I’m relying on Alex and Scott (and whoever else might be involved these days) and they let me down.

Now, again, I’m not crying about this, or trying to be a bad user, or whatever. I like feedlounge and I like some other stuff Alex has done. My only point is that when I rely on a service and it lets me down, I feel better when that service indicates that it knows that it is at fault. Just a little “My bad, sorry, we’re gonna fix some stuff and it shouldn’t happen again” is enough. I don’t need an arm or a leg, or even a refund for 17 cents.

It was not available. Even if I had known it’s IP address, it wouldn’t have had the right cookies, thus it was unavailable. There is not getting around that.

And I’m sorry, but changing my DNS setup just for FeedLounge is unreasonable, no two ways around that either.

Let me tell you a story: I have two servers. On Saturday evening I rebooted one to get a new kernel, and it didn’t come back up. This is one of my DNS servers. While waiting for support to identify the problem*, I whipped on to the other one, updated DNS, and had a “Hardware failure, I’m working on it” page up for sites that were only on one server.

(the boot partition had issues. a new hard drive and the rest of the day copying configuration over).

Even more frustrating was that I tried to hit alexking.org, and of course that didn’t get me anywhere.

Vince: I’m still a noob sys. admin but that’s what I was thinking. Redundancy is key.

Alex: It urks me that this has happened because I have paid the premium for a premium product with premium service something you have givin me until this weekend. It’s just throughs me for a loop when I see something like this.

As for a solution: Other then what you’ve already told Vince, why do you not have a back running as we speak, a crappy 300mhz pc could do what you need to just do the redirection to the new server. Maybe I’m missing something but it seems like you just have the broken box sitting and just said “oh well”, “it’l fix itself”.

Another thing, as I said in the email. A lot of people do not know what the hell “The new DNS server settings should be propagating, but if you can’t access feedlounge.com try adding 65.90.218.228 to your list of DNS servers” means

There is more on this on the FeedLounge blog.

/vjl/

And it bugs me to see this comment

“Remember – FeedLounge is up (and has been this whole time).”

It’s at least academic to claim that the site was up when my.feedlounge.com did not give me my feeds. Especially when my money is already in your bank account. And don’t get me wrong, I like feedlounge (and tasks pro, for that matter), so I’m not just a grumpy user. But if I paid for access and I didn’t get it, please don’t remind that the site is *really* still up when I can’t access it. Please just apologize and promise to work harder to make sure it doesn’t go down again.

And not all members know to check your site if feedlounge is down.

I love feedlounge but you shouldn’t ask paying users to jump through hoops because you didn’t make it as easy as possible.

And gah to feedlounge – going this long without access to my RSS feeds is criminal*. Plus what’s worse is this monthly payment went through today too. This is seriously making me consider changing back to a desktop feed reader.

* er, I don’t actually mean illegal… I just mean really really annoying.