4 ms·

This is probably the most glaring flaw in SaaS and cloud computing. Even the giants go down eventually. Couple that with your own ISP's issues and your potentia

by taitems 17y ago

This is probably the most glaring flaw in SaaS and cloud computing. Even the giants go down eventually. Couple that with your own ISP's issues and your potential downtime is doubled.

gry 17y ago
Out of curiosity, how does that differ from any other offering?
- caudicus 17y ago
  Seriously. I've worked at a large bank and a small software company and both of their in-house email systems would go down at least a few times a year for all kinds of weird reasons. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong in general.
weatherboard 17y ago
i think 99.9% average uptime is good enough, no system is perfect
btn 17y ago
How does hosting it yourself protect you from these issues (downtime)? The only thing you gain is control over the situation, which may be a worse prospect if you don't have the same level of resources that Google/whoever has to fix it.
- patio11 17y ago
  I keep my cell phone next to my ear when I go to sleep. It is set to send out a piercing whistle I get an email from a particular address, which indicates that my website has been unavailable for 15 minutes. That whistle has gone off exactly once. (Credit more to Slicehost and my software stack than to me.) You know who got blasted out of sleep at 3 AM because my email was down? I don't know, but it sure as heck wasn't me.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    I keep my cell phone next to my ear when I go to sleep. I did too, and I didn't get much sleep in those days.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    >You know who got blasted out of sleep at 3 AM because my email was down? I don't know, but it sure as heck wasn't me. Only people who were unfortunate enough to be working on the GMail team from UTC+7, perhaps UTC+6, instead of in Mountain View.
  - macros 17y ago
    Luckly half our ops team is in a timezone 9hrs offset from mine, it is extremely rare for either team to have someone woken up in the middle of the night. Sleep is good.
- ShabbyDoo 17y ago
  Furthermore, it's so much cheaper/less labor intensive to let Google host your mail. How many important things is your business not doing because your technical folk are futzing with an email server? Errors of commission are easier to identify than errors of omission. Did your business fail to identify a way to attract new customers? Nobody's tracking that, but they love to count up the minutes that email's down.
taitems 17y ago
I seem to be getting buried for a bit of a misunderstanding. If a company is hosting it internally, THEY cannot use that program in the downtime. If the entire cloud is down, NONE of the companies can do any work for a day.
- pbh101 17y ago
  Devil's advocate: "Well, if my email is down, then my competitor's is too!" I don't really know how much your argument applies to companies looking for hosted email; if they can't send, they can't send, so it doesn't matter if someone else can't receive. In fact, probably makes it better b/c they look less individually incompetent. GE's central email farm went down when I interned there a couple summers ago. All 300k+ employees' emails went out. The business is still affected by the outage if they host locally, there will probably just be more of them. And there's the illusion of control: GE had noone to blame but themselves (and the incompetent contractor who hit the big red button), whereas they could've pinned this on Google and felt worried about external risks and dependencies.
brown9-2 17y ago
On the corollary, as SaaS becomes more prevalant and popular, these outages and problems will help out and help solve these types of problems so that most of them don't have to happen again in the future. In other words, this type of outage is pretty unlikely to ever plague Google again.

by taitems 17y ago

This is probably the most glaring flaw in SaaS and cloud computing. Even the giants go down eventually. Couple that with your own ISP's issues and your potential downtime is doubled.

gry 17y ago

Out of curiosity, how does that differ from any other offering?

caudicus 17y ago
Seriously. I've worked at a large bank and a small software company and both of their in-house email systems would go down at least a few times a year for all kinds of weird reasons. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong in general.

weatherboard 17y ago

i think 99.9% average uptime is good enough, no system is perfect

btn 17y ago

How does hosting it yourself protect you from these issues (downtime)? The only thing you gain is control over the situation, which may be a worse prospect if you don't have the same level of resources that Google/whoever has to fix it.

patio11 17y ago
I keep my cell phone next to my ear when I go to sleep. It is set to send out a piercing whistle I get an email from a particular address, which indicates that my website has been unavailable for 15 minutes. That whistle has gone off exactly once. (Credit more to Slicehost and my software stack than to me.) You know who got blasted out of sleep at 3 AM because my email was down? I don't know, but it sure as heck wasn't me.
- mahmud 17y ago
  I keep my cell phone next to my ear when I go to sleep. I did too, and I didn't get much sleep in those days.
- swolchok 17y ago
  >You know who got blasted out of sleep at 3 AM because my email was down? I don't know, but it sure as heck wasn't me. Only people who were unfortunate enough to be working on the GMail team from UTC+7, perhaps UTC+6, instead of in Mountain View.
- macros 17y ago
  Luckly half our ops team is in a timezone 9hrs offset from mine, it is extremely rare for either team to have someone woken up in the middle of the night. Sleep is good.
ShabbyDoo 17y ago
Furthermore, it's so much cheaper/less labor intensive to let Google host your mail. How many important things is your business not doing because your technical folk are futzing with an email server? Errors of commission are easier to identify than errors of omission. Did your business fail to identify a way to attract new customers? Nobody's tracking that, but they love to count up the minutes that email's down.

taitems 17y ago

I seem to be getting buried for a bit of a misunderstanding. If a company is hosting it internally, THEY cannot use that program in the downtime. If the entire cloud is down, NONE of the companies can do any work for a day.

pbh101 17y ago
Devil's advocate: "Well, if my email is down, then my competitor's is too!" I don't really know how much your argument applies to companies looking for hosted email; if they can't send, they can't send, so it doesn't matter if someone else can't receive. In fact, probably makes it better b/c they look less individually incompetent. GE's central email farm went down when I interned there a couple summers ago. All 300k+ employees' emails went out. The business is still affected by the outage if they host locally, there will probably just be more of them. And there's the illusion of control: GE had noone to blame but themselves (and the incompetent contractor who hit the big red button), whereas they could've pinned this on Google and felt worried about external risks and dependencies.

brown9-2 17y ago

On the corollary, as SaaS becomes more prevalant and popular, these outages and problems will help out and help solve these types of problems so that most of them don't have to happen again in the future. In other words, this type of outage is pretty unlikely to ever plague Google again.