Most companies do not have such amazing system administrators.

Most IT departments have no chance of matching the
robustness of Google.

Articles like this one sadly give them invalid examples to argue
otherwise. At many companies, (in particular those running exchange)
email outages are a monthly or even weekly occurrence and
they NEVER have decent search capabilities.

First its easy to have a more robost system. make2 small cluster on different locations and sync every data …
google cant do that because of the massive data they would have to sync.

second big services like that have, naturally, more issues than small company based.

I dont say that google is bad. seeing the amount of users they have a hell of a job but its true that their users are not the customers, not even threaden like one. and dont even think about a real support.

theres also another issue you should really think about (specially all users who like to share their spreadsheets and so on)

big datacenters has many emplaoyments and youll have no idea who can access your data.

second a breach in their system will affect another unknown number of users and their data.

ok if you do only your household money management on a google spreadsheet noone would care. but mission critical information in shared open hostings?

sorry i dont like the idea.

btw you dont know if not any goverment whatever .org has (because of another more or less suspiciouse antiterror law) their agreements with those big data hosters like google or other..

you maybe think i should find some prof. help but remember the encryption issues in the late 90s and rethink.

i dont say it is or will be. but again. in such evoirements like google, windows live,.. you cant know. you cant controll, youve no clue.
not about the security of your data, not about the uptime of their service,.. about nothing…

for private use it might be ok but the author is talking about mission critical and here .. agian … i dont like the idea

I don\’t know what the author is complaining about.

Actually, more generally, and speaking as a sysadmin, I can\’t get over the level of expectation that people have for Internet-based services in general. 1 minute of down time is unacceptable in the public eye these days. Computers are *machines*, people! They break on occasion. Actually, pretty frequently. They are complex to fix and set up! I would love to see a general awareness push towards getting the public to understand that the internet/WWW was created by humans, runs on machines that can and do break, and by several laws of nature, must be expected to stop working occasionally.

But now I\’m just venting. Thanks!

Google has had some pretty fantastic up time over the past couple of years. Somehow, they\’ve had two outages in quick succession. That\’s still bad for Google, but hardly what I would call earth-shattering. I don\’t know what their service level has been over the past several years, but I\’d be willing to bet it\’s still a LOT better than most internal Exchange based email services.

(Another analogy might be the difference between traveling across country by car or by airplane. Statistically, air travel is much safer than traveling by car, but when a plane crashes, EVERYONE hears about it. Do people feel safer because they have the illusion that they are in control of their own destiny when they drive a car, or when they administer their own mail servers?)

http://adrianotto.com/2009/09/scale-complexity-reliability-support/

Second, my private email hasn\’t had an outage in 3 years.

I expect Google to provide at least 99.99 uptime. That\’s only minutes of downtime each year. 2-9\’s of downtime really isn\’t acceptable.

I don\’t think it is unreasonable to expect that google can keep email online.
I don\’t agree with the author jumping ship because of this 90 minute outage.

The question is really what uptime is acceptable?

Like many people, one big requirement is that my email be web-based. I can\’t access my home computer from work, and I want to be able to read my email from any computer, and not just wait until I\’m home. That would be like going back to a landline.

So, this confines me to webmail services. And this brings up the second problem: most webmail interfaces SUCK. They\’re horrendously slow, they\’re hard to use, they\’re slow, they make it hard to find specific emails, they\’re slow, you get the point? Gmail, while not as fast as a local email client (though it\’s probably faster when searching), is very fast compared to everything else out there, and the interface is excellent. It\’s so good that it totally changes the way I use email.

So if it goes offline for 45 minutes once per year, I can put up with that in exchange for the massive increase in productivity, and that MASSIVE savings in time (due to the lack of slowness) compared with competing webmail services.

@dwolsten
According to google apps status dashboard, only the LAST outage lasted an hour and a half until full service restoration. So we\’re far beyond the 45 minutes once per year.

Now, I must admit that they provide service beyond ordinary mail, but this doesnt mean that the service *quality* should suffer…

It sort of makes Google look pretty good.

As I said at the beginning – I\’m somewhat sympathetic to hosting problems, but the amount of downtime Google has had lately is unacceptable if you\’re dependent on mail. If you\’re a casual user of email and don\’t need consistent access, then it\’s not a problem. As a use of Google Apps for your Domain, Google has already this year exceeded its SLA for downtime for a service I pay for. And the outages were unplanned, which makes it worse. (I also pay for rsync.net and VPSLink services — neither has had an unplanned outage I\’m aware of in the last two years, but both services have had announced downtimes which I was able to plan around.)

Like everybody else has said… you can\’t criticize GMail\’s uptime if you can\’t say something\’s better. In other words, 90 minute uptime or not–GMail is still highly reliable, and I would definitely challenge anyone to indicate something better (in terms of uptime).

P.S.: One thing to note is, most of the time, these problems only affect select numbers of people, not everybody. And usually only the web interface is disrupted; often times, IMAP stays consistent throughout these outages.

How many years has gmail been up without any down time? seriously people the outage has been blown WAY out of proportion just because it affected so many people. If gmail can be up for 4 or 5 (? not sure) years without any downtime, then has about 2 hours of downtime in one year, thats pretty damn reliable if you ask me.