This is a poor response: Abusive, insulting and makes only a token effort to advance the discussion. Does the fact that it sits at the top of the page mean that it's the most highly rated?
And in practical terms, it seems totally theoretical.
In my experience, more information is always valuable. It's not a matter of shifting responsibility, it's a matter of understanding what the problem is and efficiently getting it resolved.
Sending out an error that is incorrect is wrong -- both a theoretical and practical observation.
I apologize if anyone felt it was abusive or insulting, it certainly wasn't intended that way. I'm very passionate about holding myself directly accountable for the entirety of my user's experience with what they paid me for. It's possible that the message suggested by the OP would improve the user's experience, but I don't see how and the OP didn't make a case for that.
Instead the article read to me as if the benefit of displaying this message is that the user's frustration might be allowed to shift to the sub-contracted vendor. I find it hard not to be infuriated by that idea.
And yeah, I think it means it's the most highly rated... or at least something very close to that.
OP was playing the role of the user. Paying customers don't care about the implementation details of the products they pay for. They only care about whether or not they work.
Leave it to paying customers to decide what they care about, and leave it to Heroku's paying customers to decide whether they care about the content of the error page.
I believe the key lies in the second sentence, 'Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku"'. My mother wouldn't care whom the hosting provider is nor understand what it is.
The hard fact is that /your app is unavailable/ and I promise that >99% of users won't care why. Did anyone care why Twitter used to Failwhale? It was down, and that sucked, and software exists these days (and has for >20 years) to eliminate single point of failure.
Please take a close look at the comment you replied to and your response. I think you'll see that you're feigning outrage, in an attempt to advance your own point of view.
And in practical terms, it seems totally theoretical.
In my experience, more information is always valuable. It's not a matter of shifting responsibility, it's a matter of understanding what the problem is and efficiently getting it resolved.
Sending out an error that is incorrect is wrong -- both a theoretical and practical observation.