You’ll still get my $5 a month!

I went to your web site PatrickQG, and saw that you were 21 years old.

Now who’s being ridiculous Bill?

I do agree, saying the service was up is … semantic in my opinion. But I do think Alex has done a good job of coming around and saying “Look, we learned a crappy lesson from this and we’ll do our best to keep it from happening again”.

Expecting an apology for this isn’t absurd or out of the question.

Let me assure you their is nothing “simple” about my view of the world.

Kevan: the only real problem with a dyndns entry is how to let your user know about it. And of course going to a third party dns provider would have still had the same delays.

You could also outsource your DNS to someone like dnsmadeeasy…

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I can certainly understand how you could feel that way, but there is a little bit of a difference. The way the DNS…
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Uh, no, the way DNS works isn’t relevant. If the user can’t get to it, it’s down. The only difference to an end user is symantics.

If I can’t get to a service, it’s down.

Wow, I think that’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read.

Oh look – I unplugged my network cable, and every web service and web site in the world was DOWN!

And I also think you guys are being absurd asking for an apology. They were clearly trying to get things working again, isn’t that the important thing? Anyone can give an apology. I’d rather have action over words any day.

Seriously, you’re splitting hairs with the service being available thing. If I can’t get to a service, it’s down. Simple. If I can’t get into my car, then I can’t drive it. Simple. Either way feedlounge was unavailable for a long period of time.

Other than that I’ll just second Jeremy’s comments.

There really isnt any reason you need to mess around with the whole DNS server thing unless you are doing name based virtual hosts or something else like that.

Just a little more info on the previous post: I took 5 minutes to throw it on the new server right after the old server died – as we were franticallly tring to get the new server up. When I wrote it, we didn’t yet know that FeedLounge was going to be affected at all – hence the hasty UPDATE to the post after the fact.

When I added the UPDATE, I had already posted an explanation and mea culpa on the FeedLounge blog, problem was people couldn’t get to it and thought that the little PS I added to that post was it.

Couple that with confusion about how DNS works and the most innocent things can get misunderstood – I didn’t fully realize the communication problem until late last night.

That may seem over-the-top to you, but it’s important for users that the admins take responsibility for the issue and demonstrate that they understand this is about customer service, not obscure technical issues. I know you work really hard to make FL a great service, but sometimes I think you might believe we’re more interested in the nuts and bolts of how things work than some of us actually are. What matters is, does it work?

In the future, the best thing to do in addition to explaining the problem (which you did patiently and more than adequately) is to explain that you understand you’re still responsible for providing the service, that you failed because of A, B, and C, and that you’re sorry, and here’s how we’re going to prevent it from happening again. The “saying sorry” part seems trivial because you KNOW what’s happening and feel bad about it, probably, but it is a big part of making us customers comfortable with these two dudes out in cyberspace that we send money to.