Dealing with Murphy
I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law… “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” In computing, Murphy couldn’t have been more spot on. Things happen. Disk drives crash. Blue screens of death occur unexpectedly. A construction crew cuts a line and your T-1 goes down for next three days. It’s happened to all of us. What’s refreshing is when a vendor proactively informs its customers about a bad situation, explains what’s going on and how its customers are affected and takes steps to insure that it doesn’t happen again. Unfuddle is such a vendor.
Unfuddle provides Subversion hosting, Git hosting, bug and issue tracking in a secure, hosted environment. I use their free, “Private” service to host several small Subversion repositories. Unfuddle offers five different plans, ranging from free (Private) to $99/monthly (Enterprise), that appeal to an audience ranging from a single developer (me) to very large, geographically diverse development teams. When I outgrow their free servce — which will happen fairly soon, hopefully — I will definitely subscribe to the Micro service for a reasonable $9/mo.
One evening last week, I received an unsolicited e-mail from Unfuddle stating that the hardware which hosted my account had experienced a failure with its attached storage earlier that morning. I don’t access my Unfuddle account daily. On that day, I hadn’t committed any changes or otherwise accessed my Unfuddle account, so I wasn’t affected by the outage (or even knew it occurred). I was very impressed with how Unfuddle handled the situation and really appreciated the open and honest discussion of the outage within their e-mail. Unfuddle certainly wasn’t obligated to tell me about the outage. I’m not a “paying” customer and, frankly, I probably woudn’t have known about the outage if they didn’t tell me. The important point is that Unfuddle did inform me about the outage. Not only that, they discussed improvements to their service that would deal with these types of outages in the future AND they also waived my entire June payment. This is their response to a non-paying customer. If they treat non-paying, “free” customers that way, just imaging how they would treat me as a paying customer!
My blog entry today is to praise Unfuddle for their actions and tell as many people as I can about my positive experiences with them. It’s far too easy to criticize companies when they do something wrong. This time, I’m complimenting Unfuddle for what they did right. Try Unfuddle today!
