Practicalmadness

I have won the victory over myself: this is the last thing I thought I’d be doing about my hosting situation, but I’ve decided to stick with TextDrive for the time being. Nothing I’m hosting is as they say mission-critical, and while I have certainly noticed the poor performance I’m not sure anyone else has noticed or cared. Sites go down sometimes, and my server enjoys about 95-96% uptime. I can live with that.

So as a generality, if you visit practicalmadness.com it’s there. It’s only proven unreliable when I’m needing to make edits or use some other facilities like Subversion. So I’m moving my Subversion code repositories to another machine and keeping this one, because (as I wrote in an e-mail to some TextDrive staffers yesterday) when things are good, they are very, very, very good.

Now, I’ll allow that for a web hosting provider, especially one that prides itself on performance and reliability, 96% uptime is inexcusably low. That’s a loss of an entire business day, and if I were an online merchant it would mean an entire lost sales day. If I were more actively interested in meeting new clients via my website, that could be one or more lost contacts which could mean one or more lost contracts.

I do, however, have some faith that the server admins are doing what they can for now, and given the choice between moving my personal site to less, shall we say, interesting hosting and sticking with the place that’ll let me run the Oscars Game as a Rails app via lighttpd with minimal setup hassle, you better believe I’m sticking with, um, that last thing.

This is not to say that I don’t think TextDrive can’t do better, and I’m taking another unexpected (to me) step. Gandhi once said that you must be the change you wish to see in the world, a sentiment I believe in quite strongly, so rather than just grabbing my toys and sulking off the playground I’ve decided to get involved on the forums.

My reason for being a better forum neighbor than I have been is simply that I want to try to strike a balance between the die-hard TextDrive fans who can completely excuse any problem, and the customers who may love the service (or not) but who feel powerless against what’s perceived as a geek clique. The perception, right or wrong, is that if you don’t agree with the admins then they don’t want you as a customer.

I have read some forum posts that disturb me. Not the ones about that one jerk getting booted for verbally abusing admins; I can’t fault that decision, as I chalk it up to Jason cutting his losses and sticking up for his team. If I couldn’t also identify with the guy’s frustration, I’d be pumping my fists and saying “rock on, TextDrive admins!”

I’m more concerned with the posts where admins take all of this way, way too personally — hosting is as much a business concern for us as it is for them, and the single primary thing I’d like to see from the admins is a greater acknowledgement that their so-far inability to keep the machines up has hurt us. An extra-long post on the status blog after Gilford crashed hard yesterday was a good step. I’d like to see even more transparency — just let me know how my $25 a month is being spent (and how it’s actually the best goddamned bargain in hosting, given the amount of work that goes into providing it) and I can’t complain. (Much.)

But the single most important thing is to keep the conversation civil, focused and open-minded. If I can help break the notion that TextDrive is for an elíte clique of open source programmers and no one else, then I’ll have earned my cookie for the day.

Update

Just checked the forums; TextDrive czar Dean Allen is offering customers who host on Gilford the month of December for free. Just doing some quick, conservative math in my head, I can tell you that that is a very expensive gesture for them to be making as a small company (even if they were just acquired by Joyent).

As demonstrated by my unwillingness to cut and run, TextDrive customers are loyal customers and (while this should not be taken to mean I’m not glad to be getting a free month) I think I’d have been satisfied with just the forum post by Dean. So thanks a bunch.