Uptime is for Obsession
Published 5 June 2008
Hi! You've stumbled upon a blog post by a guy named Ryan. I'm not that guy anymore, but I've left his posts around because cool URIs don't change and to remind me how much I've learned and grown over time.
Ryan was a well-meaning but naïve and priviledged person. His views don't necessarily represent the views of anyone.
Dreamhost, rationalizing their decoupling of e-mail and Web hosting.
Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.
And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features. Everybody’s just looking at how much disk/bandwidth they get, what version of PHP they run, how good their support is, do they have a funny blog, is their CEO really studly, do the data centers have water beds, and so on…
They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.
And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!
Amazing that people complain more about their obsessions than things costing them money. This came to mind after grumping about all the grousing I hear over Twitter's downtime.