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I don't think anyone should take it upon themselves to say "Nobody cares" about the relevant details of an error. It's not just an issue of blame, but what the end customer can do with the information. The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing. It lets the customers know the problem is probably temporary. Customers do care because a lot of them can interpret that level of error detail, and it is actionable, useful information to them. Heroku should at least give developers the option of finer grained error messages.

>In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down.

That's only partially true, there are limited viable options for platform hosts out there, and virtually no one has cracked the 100% up-time challenge, so there isn't any degree to which a software developer could choose a host with 100% up-time if it doesn't exist. Thus they're not at fault for choosing the "wrong" host or not creating something that is astronomically difficult themselves.




"The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing."

You're failing to understand that the overwhelming, vast majority of people have no idea what half the words in your sentence meant, have no idea what idea you're trying to convey, and even if they understood the idea, wouldn't be able to get it from your sentence.

Nobody cares whether it's a bug in your code or your host going down, because 99% of people don't know the difference.


I think that business customers do care quite a bit, actually. If, for instance, your business customer experiences significant downtime, but loves you otherwise, a verifiable explanation as to the source of that downtime can be the difference between keeping that customer or loosing that customer.

If the customer attributes the downtime to your host rather than you, then your customer might tell you to switch hosts rather than fire you. If you have a good relationship, the added transparency can be the difference between keeping the customer and loosing the customer.

Of course, this line of thinking is no incentive for heroku to change its practices.




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