Update: BigCommerce got back to us around Sunday noon PST and resolved it for us! Thank you guys

I helped someone out recently that did a fair amount of shopping around before deciding to give BigCommerce a shot. We liked what they had to offer – the admin interface was slick, product creation was better than the rest, variants were handled pretty neatly, checkout was smooth, shipping rules were great, all with the standard 99.9% uptime that everyone seems to be claiming these days. And with a fair amount of 3rd part integrations, it really seemed like we made a decent choice. But even with the top most plan all hell broke loose.

On a Friday morn, our store just stopped working. I cross checked and its not like we made any changes to the settings or anywhere else for that matter its just that the darn server stopped working. 36 hours, a dozen frantic “please help us” phone calls, and many tickets (escalated to what was assured as the highest priority level) later, there is still no resolution or communication back from the team thats supposed to be looking into it to say “Hey guys we know its critical. We’re looking into it. This is what we think the problem is” or whatever. BigCommerce has a decent offering – a hosted variant (a better one at that) of Interspire’s self-hosted solution. The 5 plans Bronze through Diamond sound exactly how they are supposed to “fancy, but come crunch time who gives a shit!”. If you are a small business owner then make no mistake this may be the choice you were looking for. It’s probably just you doing everything and if you’re lucky you might have a few folks to help out and at the end of the day. YOU are the “IT Team”. It’s completely understandable – everyone goes through that phase before they become big and I wish you nothing but success in your rise to the top. For you, a hosted solution like BigCommerce makes perfect sense. Platform as a Service / Software as a Service is absolutely a Godsend. If you are, however, looking for support over the weekend (I’ve read elsewhere that holidays too are bad days) for when your store goes down (god forbid) due to some issue you have no control over coz they don’t give you server access to begin with, then you better be looking to keep things in-house. Also the 99.9% uptime claim is total bogus as you can see in the table below. Let me the context up for you – now let’s say you’ve been down for 2 days and your store has been up for barely a couple of weeks so far (Scenario 1). Chances are, you started your store a 2-4 weeks prior to that to test things and what not (Scenario 2 and Scenario 3)

As you can see we are far off from the 99.9% uptime claim that comes with whatever plan you choose. And with that perhaps I should call Legal.

The thing about BigCommerce is the same thing for any Saas, Paas offering that you may be considering. The Cloud is a good thing to talk about and have until it breaks and its your livelihood on the line. I use many other cloud offerings as I write this post but none of them are what they call “mission critical”. Which is why if you are considering moving your critical stuff to the cloud, don’t learn it the hard way

Don’t trust the cloud. Because the only people that give a shit about your business is YOU!