They made the same mistake we did at a former company — put a link to our webapp’s login page (app.foo.com) on the marketing site (www.foo.com) homepage.

It wasn’t until our first marketing web site outage that we realised that our $40/mo hosting plan was not merely hosting a “marketing site” but rather critical infrastructure. That was a load-bearing $40 hosting plan. Our app wasn’t down but the users thought it was.

I learned then that users follow the trails you make for them without realising there are others, and if you take one away then a segment of your user base be completely lost.