What about our Paiiiiiid Time?

[pne]

I'm mildly amused that the entry in news addressing the recent downtime due to power failure in San Francisco talked about How will Paid members be compensated? in one of two big headlines in the post, since that seems to be a common thing people (rightfully complain|whine) about in such cases, almost as if it's LiveJournal's fault that people cannot exercise their deity-given right to read their Friends Page during a several-hour power failure affecting the colo facility.

Comments

[bride.livejournal.com]

Colo facility charges an arm and a leg and a few firstborns to guarantee up-time with multiple redundant systems.

Colo facility needs to get raked over the coals for the fact that things go down every single time they have a power failure when they've promised up and down that they'd protect against that =)

[otana.livejournal.com]

So now I've got a permanent account, does this mean that 6A pay me for downtime and the horrible, life-threatening inconvenience of not being able to access my friends page for a few hours?

[pne.livejournal.com]

If it's anything like the last time I saw, it means that paid users will get "x" number of hours/days added to their paid time.

So for you, I expect that means your permanent account expires not at the end of the universe (the Gnab Gib?) but a day or two later instead....

[bluewingedcat.livejournal.com]

I'll certainly accept (and enjoy) paid time if someone buys it for me, but this is one of the many reasons I don't go and purchase paid time for myself... you can't legitimately complain about a service you're not actually paying for.

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

Since it's:

1. A result of something completely beyond their control (the data center can't make the power grid come back up)
2. Less than 24 hours

What's the big deal?

[pne.livejournal.com]

What's the big deal?

I don't know, either, but in the past, it has appeared to be a big deal for a surprising number of people, judging from comments on news/lj_maintenance/etc. entries.

They might be a minority of users, but a fairly vocal one.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I am mildly surprised that a company as big as this has all its eggs in one basket. You'd think they could afford at least one server in another data centre miles away from the first one and pay for it by offering to mirror the whiners' accounts on it for only a few dollars per year more.

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

You know, if it was out for 6 hours, that's 2 cents by my calculation (assuming the highest price per month, too).

So they can bloody well have it just to shut them up methinks.

/I didn't factor in the userpics or storage prices cause, well, I didn't

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

I think the idea behind it makes sense. If one party to a contract can't (completely) perform its duty, the other party should also be (partly) free from its obligation. This doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the party who failed to perform its duty was at fault (at least the way I understand the underlying idea and the way the principle generally works in German law). It's just that you only wanted to give up something (here: money) in exchange for something else (here: the possibility to use LJ) and if that exchange doesn't work out for some reason, you shouldn't have to give up your money anyway.

I don't know how exactly the thing would be legally considered in this case and what law would be applicable anyway. My point is simply that you may be reading some kind of blame or assertation of fault into those compensation requests that perhaps really aren't there.