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Comment by pardner | Hacker News Reader

Actually I do not disagree.... I make the platform choices, so i live with the results. However, IMO an error message that distinguishes between an "hosting" issue and an "app" issue is not only fair, it is in fact, meaningful data to (at least some) customers.

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The people who care that it's a Heroku issue not app issue (hint: not many) have probably already heard about the Heroku outage.

Everyone else will be confused about what the hell this "Heroku" thing is.

That said, if they don't use appropriate error codes (maybe 502 or 504 for Heroku issues and 503 for app issues?) they should. But I don't think error messages should mention "Heroku" by name.

I think that's true with Heroku, but gets less true as providers get bigger. If you tell a user that your service is temporarily down "because Google is down", even a lot of regular people will know what that means, and not really blame you for it.

>"and not really blame you for it"

Delusional. If it's down, it's done, and unless your product is a developer tool, >99% of people won't care why.

So far my evidence suggests that that's incorrect. I suspect it's because a lot of people think "Google" is synonymous with "the Internet", though.

Not necessarily true, especially if your customers are management types looking to lay on the blame as thick as possible wherever they find it, and will terminate a relationship if they believe the service-provider is incompetent.

For those kinds of customers, they may understand what Heroku is and why their vendor is using it and will definitely make at least some distinction about outage fault.

I'm not sure about that either. If it was my product I think I'd want a polite on-brand 500 page saying my hamsters are working on it. Seeing something that suggests hosting is down doesn't frankly matter to me, even as a technical user... and to someone in between myself and my mom, with enough knowledge to understand what a "hosting company" is... I wonder if they might feel ripped off as well: "Oh great. I gave this company my money and they don't even have their own servers!"

Your customer wants to know whether it's you or Heroku because...? (There may be a legitimate business case for the distinction. Perhaps you can clarify.)

Why, do your users care?

You might be providing a service to people who would like to know what part of the chain broke. If hosting company A fails all the time, and that's visible to me as a technical user of service A, I would avoid hosting company A for anything that I happen to host. I'm not the average end user, but that information is still valuable to me, and I would think less of hosting company A, instead of service A.

By Heroku not listing when its their downtime, they are insulating their reputation as a hosting company from end users, at the expense of the customers already using them. It's a little shady.

I agree that the average end user would probably not care, but most not caring does not mean it's not valuable information to some people. So I see where the original poster is coming from.

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