Comments on: A great apology

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:17:31 +0000

Scott, I’m still a little on edge about this Google thing, but I have to say that in the months I’ve been using it and the weeks all my coworkers have been using it, this was the only notable glitch. But if this kind of things becomes part of the service, I’m headed for a Mac OS X Server.

By: Scott Slone

Scott Slone — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:03:53 +0000

Exactly!

I used to work for web hosting companies and when hundreds or thousands of sites go down, people feel helpless. Techs hear it all in those times of stress… I can’t imagine having switching my whole company over to Google Apps. BRAVE!

Call me a control freak, paranoid, or cautious.. but as much as I’ve wanted to – I’ve not been able to depend on a company like Google to manage my Apps, Mail, etc.! I’ve always equated it to hosting a website and all it’s data with some 3rd party hosting company.

I’ve been honestly thinking about making the switch, and as a Mac user .Mac/MobileMe has been a great experience. Apple and Google have protection in place and the loss of data is very slim to none… This outage you experienced validates the type of responsibility I’m looking for from a company.

Knowing Google, they’ve probably not brushed this glitch off lightly and working on making sure something like this does not have a repeat.

Cheers,
Scott

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:25:00 +0000

Thanks Sam. I’m trying to keep perspective on things. But it’s hard when 40 people you serve are suddenly cut off from a service they use every day and there’s nothing you can do about it.

On the whole, Google Apps, especially for nonprofits, is a raging good deal and I’ve had a good experience so far.

One advantage to running your own mail server, however, is that you can choose down times, scheduling them in low-usage periods. This Gmail outage hit right in a high-usage period, which exacerbates the feeling of helplessness.

Anyway, I’m not abandoning Google Apps just yet!

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:24:00 +0000

I am a Google apps user too and I felt the pain, but you know what, don’t worry to much about it because Google is a company that WILL do something about it and make sure that it does not happen again. If you ask me the many years they been running GMail I have had limited problems, hell I continue to get more space and more features. I love GMail.