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The odds of google being down / slow instead of your site are pretty bad. Unless you build your own data center, pull in all the fiber yourself, make the netwo

The odds of google being down / slow instead of your site are pretty bad. Unless you build your own data center, pull in all the fiber yourself, make the network switches yourself, build the servers yourself, etc... you are always going to be dependent on a third party or external service.

polyphonicist 7y ago
Google has a reputation of shutting their services down. What if they shut their fonts CDN down or change their URLs without redirects?
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Than a hell of a lot of sites lose their fonts until they update.
  - onion2k 7y ago
    To be fair, lots of people being affected hasn't stopped Google in the past. In the case of Fonts though, it's a good source of user and browser data, so it's not likely to be shut down any time soon.
- mewpmewp2 7y ago
  This might not be end of the world. In a lot of cases convenience is worth the risks. There is no golden rule that one should never depend on third parties. It is always balancing pros vs cons. Self hosting introduces extra code, resources and assets that you as a developer must introduce and maintain. This is not free. Especially if worst thing that happens is a wrong font loaded.
adrianN 7y ago
It's not instead of, it's an additional failure mode.
pmlnr 7y ago
Google is blocked in some parts of the world, so chance of "being down" is actually non zero if you think of the whole world.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Also, some webpages don’t even run on the internet.
  - ajphdiv 7y ago
    True. Saw this issue first hand on a company internal network.
rescbr 7y ago
The issue isn’t Google being down, it is my ISP’s connection to Google that might be subpar. They might have a direct peering which is down and unexpected traffic is flowing though transit, you got BGP flaps, you got local CDN outages... and in the eyes of the customer your website is down, not Google CDN.
pjc50 7y ago
For years I blocked google-analytics.com because it was on the critical path for far too many pages loading.
benhurmarcel 7y ago
> The odds of google being down / slow instead of your site are pretty bad. If my site is down, they already can't access it. Using Google Fonts just adds an additional failure probability, however small it may be.

polyphonicist 7y ago

Google has a reputation of shutting their services down. What if they shut their fonts CDN down or change their URLs without redirects?

spookthesunset 7y ago
Than a hell of a lot of sites lose their fonts until they update.
- onion2k 7y ago
  To be fair, lots of people being affected hasn't stopped Google in the past. In the case of Fonts though, it's a good source of user and browser data, so it's not likely to be shut down any time soon.
mewpmewp2 7y ago
This might not be end of the world. In a lot of cases convenience is worth the risks. There is no golden rule that one should never depend on third parties. It is always balancing pros vs cons. Self hosting introduces extra code, resources and assets that you as a developer must introduce and maintain. This is not free. Especially if worst thing that happens is a wrong font loaded.

adrianN 7y ago

It's not instead of, it's an additional failure mode.

pmlnr 7y ago

Google is blocked in some parts of the world, so chance of "being down" is actually non zero if you think of the whole world.

kube-system 7y ago
Also, some webpages don’t even run on the internet.
- ajphdiv 7y ago
  True. Saw this issue first hand on a company internal network.

rescbr 7y ago

The issue isn’t Google being down, it is my ISP’s connection to Google that might be subpar. They might have a direct peering which is down and unexpected traffic is flowing though transit, you got BGP flaps, you got local CDN outages... and in the eyes of the customer your website is down, not Google CDN.

pjc50 7y ago

For years I blocked google-analytics.com because it was on the critical path for far too many pages loading.

benhurmarcel 7y ago

> The odds of google being down / slow instead of your site are pretty bad. If my site is down, they already can't access it. Using Google Fonts just adds an additional failure probability, however small it may be.