I find the constant references to "if you don't like it leave" very unprofessional.
Chopin has been down frequently and as long as a week one time. Look at the Service alerts and
NOTHING mentioned. Searching through various forums eventually yields comment about
"we know Chopin is down and are working hard on it". There should be an immediate update to Service Alerts where we are constantly being directed to indicate status of any known outage. If you don't follow your own standard procedures, stop badgering well meaning and very appreciative users for being confused and frustrated.
Community helpers are the ones that most of the time give you support. Community helpers are not, in the same sense, staff. We are free hosting users that have proven ourselves on the forums and are given access to tools to help provide a first level of support.
Next, for the status page. Since only some staff can post to it, they need to be available to update the status website, and as much you'd like to see someone updating it in the middle of the night, people need to sleep, it's a basic need.
If you'd like, propose a suggestion to allow more staff and maybe even community helpers (at least a bigger group than the current) to post to the status page. This way you'll get they updates sooner.
Finally, for the customer thing, as Corey said, you are not a customer until you pay. Since free hosting is...free, then...
One more thing, the "if you don't like it leave" comments we do is to show in a very clear manner that if you don't like the service we offer, we do not hold you back, like other people might do. And frankly, one account less on the free servers can be the difference between instant response and request timed out.
