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I can't believe they entrust all their family jewels in Google services. My experience is that even when we used the paid Google services their customer support
by kelvin0 11y ago
I can't believe they entrust all their family jewels in Google services. My experience is that even when we used the paid Google services their customer support is at best atrocious ... try not having access to your company's most important collaborative documents for a few days ... never again for us.
- bmcgee84 11y agoI've been using Google paid services for almost 4 years now, I've yet to experience any issues. That being said I'm not saying I never will experience such problems, but on balance I would argue the risk/benefit for a small business is much more in it's favour.
- kelvin0 11y agoI was the one who had pushed to use Google, but I've been burned after some of our files became unaccessible. I wish you well ...
- stouset 11y agoYou can be burned in any scenario. I strongly suspect you're far less likely to be burned by Google (even considering poor support) than you are by doing it yourself or going with many of their competitors, for services like Gmail, Drive, and Docs. That's not to excuse their lack of support, but just to point out that alternatives might not be better. I'd rather have one problem in ten years that doesn't get resolved due to lousy support than ten problems, eight of which get resolved with stellar support. Even if you host yourself, you probably grossly underestimate the likelihood of failure. The wrong set of disks failing at the same time, a fat-finger by an admin, etc. are going to be way more common and can potentially destroy much more data. Not to mention the costs are certainly higher, when you consider hardware and administration.
- jgimenez 11y agoI agree, I've worked in several companies with different degrees of self-hosted vs. cloud-based services. Even if cloud-based services have their disadvantages I've always seen better up times and faster response times when an incident happened.
- justinsb 11y agoWhat alternative would you recommend / do you use now?
- kelvin0 11y agoWe simply host the critical bits ourselves, instead of relying on a third party cloud/host/storage.
- joeyspn 11y agoI also use some google products but if you're worried about the big prying G eyes and looking for a self-hosted replacement I guess sovereign is a good (and easy to deploy) starting point .... https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
- Chanel_Bunnell 11y agoI'm a huge fan of Fastmail for email. Any support issues or questions we have are answered by real people with an interest in helping.
- VLM 11y ago"try not having access to your company's most important collaborative documents" How? I did volunteer work for a charity and if a collaborative doc was important, on every mobile device we had "keep offline" so even in an area without internet coverage (in a warehouse or got a call while out in the wilderness or something) we had our data. We had budgets, inventories, checklists, all that kind of stuff. I guess its a design issue if a tool makes it possible to self sabotage, however much effort it requires, but its not much of a practical issue. There are parts of it that do suck like other people assuming we had fully featured excel and they do really weird things with the strangest darkest never before seen corners of excel, but overall on average it simply wasn't an issue.
- kelvin0 11y agoI went in to add an entry to an excel sheet, then a error message appeared as I was editing it (100 rows of 10 columns). After that no one from the company could access the document at all, even from different accounts ... took Google more than a week to get back to us to say we needed the document`s URL in order for them to retrieve the document.