Hopefully next time we have to apologize for something going wrong we'll be able to do a better job than the standard "We apologize for the inconvenience" reply.

here's how a company such as yours can do better (i'm addressing a web app company in general, not 37s in particular):

* reassure users that the service was "merely" unavailable and no data was lost (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what happened and why to the best of your knowledge (i think you already do this)

* explain specifically what you're going to do to ensure it doesn't happen again, within reason

* if the downtime is extensive, give paying users a free month or whatever of service (i think you would already do this), within reason

I agree that explaining the reasons/remediation is a good idea.

If you pay X for a service, generally you'll have an idea of the service level and value you expect. I think most people are reasonable about this.

Customers that go off the rails (no pun intended) because of an outage in a free/inexpensive service are probably customers you don't want to have.

You met your standard last time:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/800-what-happened-this-mo...

(Although the Rackspace comment might have been a tactical error).

I was impressed with the post today, is why I commented.

I'd suggest thirty-foot high letters of fire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guid...

They already have.