Well said!

"Luke nailed it. All 4 points were spot on."

AGREED!
----

And as for @sneak's quote...

    "We're working on mitigating it. Stay tuned."

Stay "**TUNED**" where exactly?  Twitter?

Man...  

I only use SteemIt because it's the only Blockchain out there that does what it does.
But based on it's "Team," it is also **THE WORST**.

A little bit tragic, at least for me personally, that I made such a confident post on why we needed Steem and used a picture of the Reddit failure one...

> What is the worst case scenario if we NEVER do that?

Worst case? The company and the site will not be taken seriously by professional investors and brands who might otherwise integrate and risk their brand reputation by being associated with this project. I know that's an extreme case, but please hear me out.

> What is the harm done?

This, I think, gets at the core of concern I've been hearing from the community over the past year+ I've been here. 10 hours of down time for a brand is _serious harm done_. Any and all downtime that isn't well-communicated and explained is harm done. Most professional companies fully and completely understand this. If Steemit, inc does not, that's really concerning. People that may have been supporters of the platform may never come back because of that failed first impression. It seems _more_ shady if the site returns a default browser error than if the site has a status page and explains a professional team of developers know about the issue and are working on it. If people can't review a history of previous downtime on a status page, they can't evaluate if the site is legit or a scam during those outages. Too many people already think anything cryptocurrency related is a scam and impressions like this don't help improve that perception.

> Seriously, though - this is a rare occurrence.

I have to respectfully disagree. Being out this long due to a DDoS attack, yes, that's very rare. Seeing a 5XX response on steemit.com? Unfortunately not very rare. Over the past year, it has happened many, many times to me and others. IMO, it's well past time to have a status page and a professional 5XX response page. For each hard-fork that I can remember, the site experienced some issues. IMO, it would be much better to display a status page instead of a broken site.

> There are some major security considerations involved in doing that that Twitter and GitHub don’t have to contend with.

GitHub deals with PCI and HIPPA compliant source code for companies processing billions and billions of dollars worth of transactions. They have very serious security considerations. Same for Twitter. Can you imagine the brand fallout (or even global fallout) if the Twitter account of the president was hacked into?

I think I understand your perspective, but I hope you're open to hearing an outside perspective as well. What you're saying sounds elitist to me. Arguing Steemit has more advanced security concerns than other sites and therefore can't have a global CDN or a professional status page doesn't make sense to me. You have vendors for your web servers, your DNS, your image hosting, etc, etc. As I said before, if you don't trust your vendors then you need new vendors. If you do trust them but a status page, professional 5xx landing page, and clear communication are not priorities, then just state that instead of bringing up security concerns that, to me, don't make much sense.

I'm open to being completely wrong here and not fully understanding the unique challenges you face with this site, but so far, what I'm arguing for here seems pretty obvious to me.

I know I'm being tough, but I really am on your side. I've always been a big supporter, and I regularly get flak about it in the chat rooms. I really want Steemit, Inc to succeed. Unfortunately, too many people use the term "STINK" instead. IMO, being humble about weaknesses and open to criticism and improvement suggestions (and implementing them) will go a long way towards improving community relations.

Thanks for responding. I love that I can openly (and hopefully respectfully) voice my concerns and be heard directly by you and your team. I look forward to hanging out at Steemfest2 and meeting you all in person so we can tell war stories of major site outages I've experienced as well.