WordPress Reaches Out
Last Friday, I commented on the outage at WordPress.com.
Over the weekend, WordPress contacted us in response to that post. They took issue with a few points and sent us a heartfelt and thoughtful response outlining some of the work they had done to battle their outage. The conversation was enlightening and caused us to reflect differently on the outage.
As you may know, we’ve never shied away from defending a competitor that was doing the right thing. We were very public in our support for Rackspace — one of our largest competitors and industry colleagues — last year during its series of tragic outages.
We’ve also never had a problem challenging those that weren’t. When a new wave of “solar powered” hosts began targeting eco-oriented blogs and lambasting them for hosting with companies like ServInt, we called them out on it and pointed out our own green credentials.
We have always treated our blog as a public facing forum for ideas, we want readers to know that real people with real emotions and opinions work at ServInt. I think it’s that willingness to engage in constructive and frank conversations that set us apart from other people in this industry who would rather play it safe.
So, thanks again to our friends at WordPress for sharing the information with us that they did. WordPress powers our blog and is the cornerstone of our own Blog VPS line, so it goes without saying that we’re fans and love the platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation and as open source stewards for more than a decade, we love and admire innovative companies that help make software development free and community driven. The WP staff and community have done great things for the Internet and are clearly talented, brilliant assets to the web.
Here are a couple of the responses the folks at WordPress pointed us to:
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog post detailing the outage.
Again, we appreciate their reaching out and setting the record straight.
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On the WordPress Outage
When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.
Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.
However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.
Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.
But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.
I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.
Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.
ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.
People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.
I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.
When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.
Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.
Why ServInt Stands Beside Rackspace and You Should Too
The fateful night in 2004 when ServInt's fiber was cut
ServInt has been in business for nearly 15 years. In that time we have seen incredible success, we have seen defeat, and we have seen resurgence. We have had honest, healthy competition from friends and colleagues and we have seen disingenuous poaching by hundreds of companies who — surprise — aren’t around anymore. What we are seeing now is a reminder of how a responsible company handles a serious issue, and how some companies try to take advantage of that.
Rackspace has had a series of power related issues in their Dallas-Fort Worth Data Center that temporarily brought down a not-insignificant number of customers. From the beginning and throughout the ordeal, Rackspace was communicative, forthright, and responsive about the entire process on their corporate blog as well as on Twitter. Customers were justifiably upset, after all their business is on the line, and they vocalized it appropriately in phone calls, emails, and tweets. All respectable webhosts strive to provide as much uptime as humanly possible and while I won’t speculate on the causes of the very public outages, I will say that in our mind we feel Rackspace has been incredibly professional and an exemplary Industry peer throughout this crisis.
ServInt’s last network outage was in 2004 when our major fiber lines were cut in the last mile. These lines were supposed to be redundant. However, our provider at the time combined the two at the last mile for reasons that they have still never disclosed to us (though we have since ensured that the same problem cannot reoccur). Murphy’s Law struck, and the combined line was cut, leaving ServInt’s customers without service for a considerable amount of time. I was literally standing on the sidewalk talking to the ServInt team on the phone and ensuring that the line was getting restored as quickly as possible. I was not a happy man that day in the freezing Washington, D.C. winter, having to explain to ServInt’s customers that we had let them down. It is not a good feeling.
So now, 5 years later, ServInt has fought hard to maintain the best uptime in the business, and we’ve done so knowing full well the consequences of failure and knowing that our customers would hold us accountable.
Rackspace is there right now. The weather might be nicer in Texas, but the sentiment is the same. They had a bad week, but are holding themselves accountable and encouraging their customers to do the same. Ultimately, the true test of a company is not how well it does at the top of its game, but how quickly it gets back up. Rackspace will get back up and we look forward to it.
There are several companies, if you can even call them companies, who have been in business for less time than a stale pot of coffee and are throwing mean spirited, transparent promotions out to justifiably angry customers. We feel this is not only in bad taste, but it is unethical and an excellent testament to how they view their fellow hosting providers. You attract customers by providing great service and thereby earning it, not by bashing someone else’s.
To those who are seriously considering these services, how do you feel about a company that devotes its time and energy as a vulture? If something similar happened to them, would they be as communicative? Could they even survive it? Would you want someone who holds such contempt for other businesses to be trusted to host your own?
Karma, after all, is the great equalizer of men.
As there are parallels between ServInt and Rackspace — we are competitors on some levels — both of us understand the complexity of large-scale hosting. ServInt has been through this before, we have come out a stronger company because of it, and we know that Rackspace and its employees, customers, and shareholders will walk away with a stronger company too. We at ServInt thank them for their contribution and innovation to our industry, and we wish them the best.
And here’s the bottom line for those of you who are thinking about jumping ship on Rackspace. There are always reasons to leave any hosting provider, but make sure that your reasons are the right ones. You might just go from “problem today, none tomorrow” to “here today, gone tomorrow”.
