Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Whew! It’s been a long time in coming…but the new beta for NewsGator Online is now online and ready to try. We’ve been slowly trickling it out over the last couple of weeks, and a handful of people have been playing with it, with the feedback being universally positive.

But what is it? And why?

It’s an entirely new, ajax-based reading experience. Visually, it looks fairly similar to the “classic” reader…but it’s much faster, has a lot fewer page loads, and generally “feels” better when you’re using it.

It was built for two reasons. First, to make the reader faster. Hundreds of thousands of people use NewsGator Online every day, and we want to make that experience as fast, efficient, and enjoyable as possible. And second, it’s the first release of an extensible GUI platform, on top of which we’ll be building out lots of new features pretty quickly.

It’s a beta, though, and it’s actually an earlier beta than we typically release. There are some rough spots, so the usual beta caveats apply…it might get your dog sick, steal your girlfriend, and scratch your car. :-) But it’s evolving very quickly - so if you want to see what’s coming, definitely take a look!

Click here to try the beta. Bookmark that page - you can also use it to switch back and forth between the beta and classic readers.

And don’t be shy - let us know what you think!

Wow, seems like everyone is using Twitter here. Not one to be left too far behind, I am now too. :-) Find me at http://twitter.com/gregr.

If you track me down, I might give you a cool demo of some stuff that’s not released yet… :-)

Daniel at Red Sweater (MarsEdit’s new home) has a post up talking about his web host, DreamHost, and some recent downtime. This reminds me of way back, in early 2003, when newsgator.com was running on a shared hosting platform, and the service became more and more unreliable.

But what really led me to comment about this was the seemingly flippant attitude from DreamHost about the outage. Their “apology” jokes about how you shouldn’t be reading your email anyway at 2am, and they make fun of SLA’s that refund a portion of your monthly bill, which they say in this case would be $0.44.

Sheesh. If my hosting facilities sent me a note like that in the morning, I’d be looking for a new partner in the afternoon.

We do have SLA’s with the folks who host our systems. And yes, we do get service credits in the event they are down - after a few hours of downtime, we have a 100% credit on our monthly bill. But does that really do any good?

Well, to me, I don’t care that I’m getting my monthly bill back - I need the site up, I’m paying for it, and I want service, not a service credit. But the part that makes me happy is if they go down, and have to start refunding, it will really hurt them. Say you’re making $5M per month in hosting fees…and you have an outage for a few hours, which leads to you having to credit your customers to the tune of $5M. That’s real money - and because of that, they’re easily able to justify the infrastructure required to stay up and running and meet their SLA’s.