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 underlying hardware layer - something is odd with the hosting. In many the code hasn't been touched for months and it has been running like this for ages just fine. Now, suddenly an issue pops up, causing confusion and strong emotions.
But I didn't changed anything!
Please believe us: That happens. Often it's just a matter of threshold or usage patterns. For instance, when the database grew in the meanwhile (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 job is to explain that this is typically not an infrastructure problem, but an application issue. In most cases, we can help clients identify what's causing their problems. This can be a delicate situation. Sometimes business owners contact us after their web developer told them to do so. We then ask them to contact their developer again so the developer can work with us 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 us much as we can. Case by case.