DISQUS

rogermbyrne · 1 month ago

How about a push mobile/iphone app now that would be a good call for such mission critical services or even just plain ole sms...

Jesse Stay · 1 month ago

Roger, that's a great idea. I'm open to that as well, but still, everyone
has e-mail. Not everyone has an iPhone.

Scobleizer · 1 month ago

Email is fine, but lots of them get sent to junk mail folders and will be missed. Why is Twitter so paid attention to? Because it's public. Answer a question once and it is answered for everyone. Most people who don't like Twitter know to use our blog or our chat support or, even, gasp to use the old-school telephone (a real human will answer your call 24 hours a day at Rackspace).

Jesse Stay · 1 month ago

That's my point though Robert - customers shouldn't have to come to you to
know their service is down. You should be notifying customers when stuff
like this happens. Twitter, a blog, etc. have their place but they can't
push to me to let me know when my service is down due to a Rackspace
mistake.

Guest · 3 weeks ago

Sending massive alerts is actually a harder challenge than it sounds. My university has been testing an alert system that notifies us via email, text message, phone call, and IM about emergencies and it fails for me rather often.

brandy thomas · 1 month ago

awesome idea

brandy thomas · 1 month ago

awesome idea

rpetty · 1 month ago

I agree. The Twitter updates are nice to spread the message to a mass audience, but paying customers deserve a more personal touch and more information.

Scobleizer · 1 month ago

Paying customers know how to get support via more traditional channels. But, remember, most of our customers are hard-core geeks and Twitter is the fastest way to interact with a large group of geeks.

Jesse Stay · 1 month ago

Robert, how was I even supposed to know that there was an issue? You guys
need to notify your customers when things like this happen, and Twitter is
an ineffective means of push notification in situations like this. A mass
e-mail would have been sufficient, and not very difficult. I didn't even
know there was a "scheduled maintenance". I was never notified to be
prepared of such.

rpetty · 1 month ago

Robert, that was my point, Twitter is great to get the word out, but I'm a paying customer and like Jesse was unaware of the issue until Jesse raised it in the blog post.

Now, mind you my blog isn't "mission critical" by any stretch of the imagination, but a personal touch would be nice. Of course, I don't think I'm paying for that level of service, so I'll have to check the SLA again. I will monitor Twitter more closely and should probably have Rackspace tweets hit my mobile.

That said, I couldn't be happier with Rackspace overall. Great products and great service.

tauni · 1 month ago

I appreciated reading your post. I couldn't agree with you more. It seems like companies expect their customers to go find the information today (i.e. check Twitter), as opposed to sending an email, text, etc. I hope that companies will reengage the customer as opposed to just "joining the conversation."

mhanda · 1 month ago

I think that any form of communication regarding services being down should be expected. Most people will have their email services on the affected hosting and wouldn't get the message. In addition, I expect my host to be focusing on correcting the issue and not spending time trying to compose an email, then consolidating the affected users, then sending out mail notifications. It just seems like a waste of resources. If I know where I can go to see that they are aware of the problem and are working to fix it, I am satisfied. In reality all I care about is if my data is still there and when will my service be restored.

miketempleton · 1 month ago

Jesse: Although you prefer email, I'm sure there are many others out there who would prefer another method. Also, it seems like posting to a status blog or updating Twitter requires less overhead than putting together an email message to who knows how many recipients. Plus, as Robert mentioned, then you are dealing with potential for spam filtering, etc.

What about offering up an option as an opt-in service where you can indicate that you want to receive service interruption notices via email? If Rackspace built a permissions-based list and found a way to convert a status blog post into an email, then you could be notified as soon as something was published.

I do think you are on to something when talking about the push-versus-pull scenario for service outage updates (they should be telling us it is down, not expecting customers to come to them), but I can also understand the complexity of building such a notification service.