10-2-2009 Gmail service down again
james October 2nd, 2009
Gmail has gone unresponsive and/or our users are seeing response times of 1-2 minutes when sorting their email in Thunderbird rather than the usual 1-2 seconds if it works at all.
We have seen gmail downtimes of several hours in the past month and this month is not starting off well. For personal use, this would not be a huge issue. For business use, this IS a HUGE issue. With the September outages, many bloggers have commented that this is acceptable for a free or low-cost service. This is not how I see it. If I could pay more for better service with google, I would. We are currently using their “premier” business service and the downtime affects our productivity.
Another point many bloggers make is that corporate email downtime is typically higher than the gmail downtime we see on average. Here again, I disagree. Perhaps we are unique but our email downtime is correlated to our dedicated server downtime which is approximately 99.99% (four nine) reliability. Even if our downtime was the same numerical value as google, so far less than 99.9% (three nine) reliability, it would not pose the same issue as our down time is nearly exclusive to maintenance performed late at night outside of normal working hours.
Another interesting point is that they claim “99.9% uptime guarantee SLA and 24/7 support.” I would have to start logging their times but in September, they failed to meet their 99.9% and their support is awful even with a support plan.
I want (and am willing to PAY MORE FOR):
- 99.99% uptime
- Better support / remediation for performance issues
Apparently I need the Super Enterprise Premier MAXX edition of google apps and I bet MANY other business users would be interested in a higher reliability plan.
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