The trouble with services 5

Posted by Colin A. Bartlett Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:18:00 GMT

I’ve been evaluating services from 37signals recently including Basecamp and Highrise. We’ve been long overdue for an upgrade to our internal job and contact management systems and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try what many people say are some great apps.

So far, I’ve been generally happy. I still have hurdles to get over in my mind such as having to pay each and every month, not having my data under my own control, and not being able to instantly add whatever feature we want. But in general, I’ve been pleased.

But at this moment, I can’t seem to get to any 37signals product. Perhaps they’re having some kind of technical trouble. I’ve tried navigating to their services from several points on the interwebs and: nothing.

And so, I’m confronted by the other reality of hosted services: Outages are out of my control. Which, of course, has both benefits and disadvantages.

  • Benefit: I’m not running around like mad trying to get Basecamp up and running right now.
  • Disadvantage: I’m powerless to do anything.

Even if I was using a home-built, in-house app, somewhere down the line someone else is still responsible. For the datacenter, for the bandwidth, for the hardware, etc. And so I think that the benefit of not being the one up shits creek without a paddle outweighs the disadvantage of having to sit on my thumbs right now.

But, it’s still frustrating as hell.

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  1. Avatar
    DHH 21 minutes later:
    We're terribly sorry about this downtime. We're keeping http://status.37signals.com/ updated with the latest on the situation.
  2. Avatar
    Justin 21 minutes later:
    Yeah, in evidently someone else is responsible... but that doesn't matter to the general user population. The masses as a whole are unforgiving and you know this. Their agony spreads upstream until it ends to you, even if some router in Bumsville, Idaho is on the fritz.
  3. Avatar
    Colin 26 minutes later:
    Unforgiving is right. I remember when we hosted all our stuff in-house here. YOU try telling a client that we're waiting for the Verizon truck to get here!
  4. Avatar
    Andy 37 minutes later:
    I have to say that while the situation is unfortunate, I'm impressed at their openness. There does not seem to be any attempt to spin the situation. Much like with the recent problems at dream host with billings. My hats off to their openness in the process. Good luck getting everything straightened out guys!!
  5. Avatar
    Justin 43 minutes later:
    Joyent, Twitter, Dreamhost, 37signals... kill'em all, let God sort'em out...
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