

Ask HN: When your production webapp breaks, what do you do? - marcamillion

When you don't know how to fix it, what do you do?<p>For those that are not YC alum, what are the options?<p>Just sit on Stack Overflow until someone can help you ? Or check out the other forums and IRC chans?<p>Is there not some other service/way you can get help when you need it?
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ryanto
First, why did it break? Figure this out. Is it something you can prevent from
happening again, or is this most likely to be a recurring thing?

Whatever your app is there is probably a hosting platform out there for it.
One that provides a very stable environment for your application to run in,
specific to your language/framework. These cost a little more money, but if it
means your app not crashing once a month chances are it's well worth it.

Some web hosts will guarantee certain apps to work on their servers. These
hosts often have 24/7 tech support to deal with these issues.

And... most of the time Google can provide you with answers a lot quicker than
StackOverflow.

~~~
marcamillion
I mean, even outside of the hosting platform.

More, along the lines of say a user uses your app for a use case that you
never intended/imagined and it breaks.

Something that you didn't even anticipate...how do you solve that issue?

I guess Googling, but it just feels kinda wrong to be taking people's money on
a monthly basis and not knowing how to solve all the issues they might have
with the app.

~~~
andrewf
If it turns out that your app is not suited for their purposes, but they
didn't really have a way to realise that up-front, a refund is generally the
way to go. You might also have to do some extra work to accomodate them
transitioning out of your service.

Let's say you have a simple reminder list site. All the work you did
(assertions, constraints on database tables, memory limits on the PHP process,
whatever) assumed that users would have at most 200 todo items. One user has
hit 800, now the website asserts out whenever he asks it to do anything, and
you know that your infrastructure couldn't cope with a dramatically higher
number of todos.

There are long term questions to ask about the product here. But in the short
term, what I would do, roughly in order of priority, is:

* Do some quick queries to see if any other users will hit the same problem soon.

* Temporarily tweak the app wherever possible so it works with up to 900 items.

* Communicate all of this to the user. Sorry, we didn't anticipate this, if you really need that many todo items, we're not the app for you. Offer them a refund. Point out that things will work for now, but they are near the newly raised limit.

* Help the user transition - "if you want to leave us, tell us when you've stopped adding new items, and we'll email all of your existing items in an Excel spreadsheet"

* Fix your app so users can't create more than a few hundred items.

~~~
marcamillion
This is a wonderful breakdown.

Makes total sense.

Thanks.

