When can we expect our sims to stop spontaneously crashing all the time?

Title asks it all.

Here's what I am talking about.

Between horrendously long lag spikes which lead to everyone being disconnected from the sim, to actual hard crashes which cause the sim to be moved to a different server, it is beyond ridiculous.

i asked LL concierge a week ago some questions about the same for my region

guess.... no answer ... yet

We've been asking for a year.

No resolution yet.

One of my sims has been having ongoing problems with lag/crashes for a long, long time now. It got so bad in the end that residents were moving out. At one point I spent an hour on the phone with a LL concierge, only to eventually by told by the concierge service that they had no idea what was causing the problem, and all they could do was refer it to the grid monkey/engineers. The grid engineer came and examined the sim, in detail, and all they could find was a single physical prim somewhere on the region. They couldn't find the cause of the problem at all, and offered me no reassurance. Not only could they not fix the problem, they did not even bother contacting me to let me know they had looked at the sim and could not find the problem. They just looked, found they couldn't fix it and said nothing.

Suffice it to say, some of my residents run businesses on this sim. One of them asked me for a refund of the tier they paid on the grounds of the poor performance of the sim. I said I could not do that as LL would not refund the tier I had paid. Then I realised that, fundamentally, my customers did deserve a refund - the sim was screwing up, and there was nothing that we could do about it aside from nag LL. They were losing money as a result of poor sim performance, when both I and them had been doing everything we could to keep the sim stable and running well. I emailed the concierge, requesting a refund of two months of my tier for the region, on the grounds that it was performing so badly that my customers' businesses were badly effected, and they were losing money and then moving out of the region as a result. In short, I requested a refund on the grounds of terrible performance of the product, and the damaging effects of the product's failure. I pointed out that I stood to lose hundreds of dollars and a lot of reputation with my customers due to sim problems that only LL could fix, and that LL were fundamentally not fixing. Of course, I never got a response to that email. Not even a polite 'no', or 'we are working on it'. Just silence.

The sad thing is that I pay many, many times as much for each sim I own as I do for the dedicated server hosting I have - but the dedicated servers haven't had ANY downtime in many months, have customer support that always respond to my emails within an hour, and it costs me a small fraction of what each SL sim costs me on a monthly basis.
Not only that, but my dedicated servers have NO startup cost either.
Over a year, I pay $600 for a dedicated server to get excellent customer support, almost zero downtime, and very good performance.
Over a year, I pay between $3590 and $5215 for a SL simulator, and get little customer support, downtime on a daily basis, and lag much of the rest of the time.

I'm normally pretty positive about LL, and they may well be trying hard... however, I'm not sure they are aware just how bad they look as a company when compared to other hosting services.

When you are looking bad compared to services that cost 20% of what you charge, you have a serious problem.
Fix it.

I have to agree with Angel on this, and it's a good job LL run under US jurisdiction because if they ran under UK jurisdiction they'd be bankrupt. In the UK you have to make sure that any goods or services offered are fit for quality; that is, to a normal person looking at the product or service, that person would be satisfied with the quality. I have to say that very few people would be satisfied with aspects (not everything, but aspects) of Second Life's service, and amongst the most prominent issues are stability and customer service.

One follows from the other. Solving the stability issue would lessen the number of calls to customer services, thereby making customer service an easier thing to handle. I think that was most of the frustration behind the open letter in the first place, since at the very least the first three points fit nicely under this heading.

It won't get better unless and until Linden Labs cease looking for ways to introduce new content at the expense of working on ways to solve outstanding issues. Without the core issues of sim stability being fixed, I do fear that one of these days the grid will come crashing down in a domino effect - and then it will be extremely difficult to get back up again without addressing some of these important issues, which will have to be done in downtime. I wonder if Linden Labs could financially survive such a catastrophy.

The US has a number of consumer protection laws as well in the Uniform Commercial Code, including ones which specify implied warranties. The issue is that the UCC allows merchants to specifically disclaim these implied warranties in their contracts (except in some states) and they often refer to products, not services. Few, if any have bothered to test to see if these laws can be applied to underperforming/incompetent service providers, though I suspect we will start seeing it happen more and more as time goes on.

That would be just what LL needs; a big, fat class-action suit over what essentially amounts to violations of the UCC and defrauding customers by overcharging for a service for which they can't even maintain a satisfactory quality level.

Anyway, I am with ya, Angel. I run webservers which don't have anywhere near the downtime of SL sims, and they cost very little in comparison.

Fortunately, I have yet to shell out any serious money for SL sims, but I do manage a few. I feel for the owner(s), and have gone to bat for them with LL on numerous occasions, only to essentially get no resolution, as the problems continue unabated. LL is seeing to it with the sim price increase as well as the horrid design and performance issues and lack of support that I will probably never become a sim customer of theirs.