Performance problems + people problems
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My site crashed. Fix ASAP!
Most performance problems are people problems. Developers often overlook performance design until disaster.
Daily drama
Support requests from customers complaining about server errors asking us to fix it (immediately) are our daily reality. The website may suddenly return a 503 or 504 server error and when people read 'server error', they often suspect something is wrong with the underlying hardware layer — something is odd with the hosting. In many cases, the code hasn't changed in months and ran fine until now. Then, suddenly an issue pops up, causing confusion and strong emotions.
But I didn't change anything!
That happens. Often it's just a matter of threshold or usage patterns. For instance, when the database grew in the meantime (for example by bots visiting the website), a query that was fast before, is now expensive and CPU intensive. Or you have a new phone and the images you upload are larger now, harder to crunch. Or the editor uploaded a lot of photos.
Our perspective
We monitor our infrastructure continuously and alert on platform-wide anomalies. When something goes wrong, we follow established incident procedures. Occasionally, new types of issues emerge that monitoring doesn't yet cover - in those cases, we typically hear from support first, often when multiple customers report the same symptom. Support agents have clear criteria for when to escalate to DevOps.
Most website downtime is not a platform issue. It is caused by the code customers deploy.
Our job is usually to explain that the problem is in the application, not the infrastructure. In most cases, we can help identify what's causing it. Sometimes business owners contact us after their web developer told them to do so. We then ask them to loop their developer back in so we can work together directly.
Responsibility
We are in it together.
We run the infrastructure. You are responsible for the code you write and deploy. That's essentially what our terms of service state. We believe it's important to separate responsibilities clearly. This separation can be challenging. We often work with freelancers and website creators who excel at creating good designs, managing clients, and configuring content management systems. Performance optimization requires deeper insights into underlying technical processes.
We aim to help as much as we can. Case by case.