Customers usually don't care about the reason for outage. They gave you money. If the service is running, good. If it's not, you screwed up. No matter what actually happened, you should've been prepared. Sad but true.
"No matter what actually happened, you should've been prepared."
This is just plain false. Being prepared comes at a cost. If you over-prepare, then your customers have to pay more for no good reason, and they don't necessarily want to. You have to draw a line and make a judgement call.
There are such things as natural (or political) disasters so serious that it would be extremely stupid to plan for them. And there are other disasters in between this and run of the mill. Again, it's a judgement call. And it's not your "fault" if the customer wants a combination of low price and reliability, and you made a reasonable tradeoff in order to achieve it.
As long as you are being honest with your customer and explain this somewhere.
The problem is one of expectations, if you don't say anywhere what have you prepared for and what are you going to do when something you didn't prepare for happens, you are misleading the customer, as they will rightly assume you have prepared for most ordinary things (heroku outage, for instance.)
It is false. Most of the time, at least. But then again I wasn't expressing my opinion but a probable opinion of Your Regular Customer.
Yes, Heroku should put up a different error notification when the problem is on their side, but I doubt it would make that much of a difference in the eyes of the user.
