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I've only worked with a handful of small software development companies / software service providers in my few years of dealing with vendors at my day job, and without fail they always seem to forget that they should be pretending that they are big developers. And by pretending to be big developers, I mean adopting their business practices on a smaller scale. This includes effective quality control, tight software testing, and not releasing software at the end of your long and tiring day and assuming nothing will go wrong with it. Thinking like a big software company also includes warning that most important sector of your business -- your users and those that are deputized to train them and calm them down on your behalf -- when there will be system downtime for upgrades. Don't forget to ask ahead of time if you want to change the default behavior of key features in such a way that the users might think your software is broken when it's not. Within the past week alone I've seen irresponsible examples of a vendor breaking just about every rule I've noted above.

That takes me to my second, related attack, and that would be on websites that just decide to pick up a server and walk it somewhere else without telling, oh I don't know, their audience? If your site is one of many competing for eyeballs and advertiser dollars to try and pay the bandwidth bills and make you famous, don't you think downtime and the uncertainty of a page taking forever to finally load to a blank "not found" page or -- even worse, the uncertainty of a forum signature depending on your service being there suddenly shows nothing -- would be the kiss of death? Of course it is.

I'm not going to pretend that my server or site is up all the time. It's not, but when it falls down I make every effort quickly pull a sheet over it and stick a sign up telling folks not to worry, it'll be right back after these important messages. Even if it takes a day or two or four, if someone comes looking for me and sees that sign, they think I might actually make it back. If they see nothing, well, they think I'm gone for good.

So, TripleChat and TripleTags, while I've sent and received email with your owners and know that you've moved very suddenly and are either waiting for new digs to set up shop in or are waiting for DNS to reconnect to you, what's your excuse for unannounced downtime?

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.