Comment by krisoft

I think planned and managed downtime is okay. A website, especially commercial ones, going down randomly, without a human readable status page destroys trust in them.

For example I planned to work on a project on sunday for which i would need some sterling silver sheets. My usual supplier is cooksongold.com, and since precious metal is such a high trust product I would be normaly very reluctant to go and search for a new supplier. But their website is on the fritz since yesterday. Which makes me think i need to find some new supplier. Who knows maybe they are going out of business even. Or maybe they are just having trouble with their database. That’s the kind of situation where the damage is. Where consumer behaviors can maybe permanently alter just because of some technical malfunction.