Gmail was down for a couple hours yesterday afternoon due to a systems failure.
No biggie.
For some, it was a biggie. Lots of screaming on Twitter and some other places about the fact that gmail wasn’t available. I find that amusing, actually. Very amusing.
Gmail is cool, and lots of us use it (100 million or so worldwide). I count on it for lots of things, including long-term storage and plenty of it. Combined with Google docs it’s a powerhouse for me (and for many others). But if it goes down, I don’t complain. It’ll come back, eventually. Just like all the other web-based solutions I use on a daily basis that have intermittent outages.
Gmail is FREE. You aren’t paying for it, you are only using it. That means when it goes down, you just take a deep breath and move on, and come back later when it’s back up. In the two years plus that gmail has existed, how many outages have there been? I can count them on one hand. And the fact is, during the outage, no data was lost, and incoming mail was still being delivered to each user’s gmail inbox. I’d say that’s pretty stable for a web-based system, one that we are not paying a dime to use.
It amazes me sometimes how quick we are to complain about things being out of service, when we are getting those things for free to begin with. If my ISP goes down, or my web services provider goes down, then I have something to complain about. I’m paying for their service an expect excellent up-time. But when it’s something I’m getting for free, then I feel I have no right to complain if there is downtime.
You get what you pay for. Right?
Um, there are people who pay to use Gmail. Remember, they do hosting for companies and individuals.
I aggree with you, people are too quick moaning about free services, truth is that you do not have any rights if you dont pay, or is it? well services like Gmail relies on advertising and if people get fed up with poor service and they leave, the advertisers will leave also, for a big company like Google that is somewhat a big deal, noting is more important than their reputation on the Internet, are they relieable? absolutely, like you said their outs can be counted on one hand, that is more than can be said about a lot of paid services.
Great post