Everybody’s beloved Media Temple recently announced they would no longer be sending out e-mail notifications for scheduled or emergency maintenance:

Based on customer feedback, (mt) Media Temple will no longer send email notifications regarding scheduled maintenance or emergency maintenance actions. Instead, we will use our System Status Blog and Twitter to share important maintenance-related information with you. This change will go into effect on August 14th, 2010.

Translation: “Dear customers we’re too lazy to also offer e-mail updates, and we just assume everyone uses and loves Twitter like we do.”

It’s not like Twitter is ever down, and self-hosted blog isn’t likely to be affected by maintenance or even collapse under heavy traffic. It sounds like a great plan, except a few hours later this came:

…we began hearing from lots of customers who very much liked the emails and who found value in the notifications. As a result, we have decided to create an opt-in system that will allow us to send notifications to users who desire the email they are accustomed to.

Translation: “Dear Customers, we don’t know what we are doing…”

I’ve always found Media Temple to be more about image than practicality. They cost far more then the competition and first hand, their “(gs) Grid Service” is awful. I constantly get error notifications about the MySQL database going on vacation in the middle of a query, or the disk suddenly becoming unwritable.