Is the Google Apps Uptime Promise Legit?
Is the Google Apps Uptime Promise Legit?
Posted 12/05/2008 at 7:43am
| by Paul Lilly
4
Comments
Print
According to Pingdom, a company that keeps tabs on website availability, Google's service level agreement (SLA) for its Google Apps service might not be fair to the consumer. As outlined in the SLA, paying customers would receive a credit if Google Apps fails to maintain a 99.9 percent monthly uptime. The problem with that, as Pingdom sees it, is that only outages that last 10 minutes or more are counted as downtime by Google.
"What if Google Apps was down for 9 minutes, up for 1 minute, down 9 minutes, etc.?" Pingdom wrote in a blog post. "That would mean 54 minutes of downtime each hour, but Google still wouldn't count it because none of the individual downtimes lasted 10 minutes (or) more."
Pingdom admits its example represents a worst case scenario, but points out in a more real-world example how 57 minutes of downtime might only be counted as 26 minutes, or less than half of the actual outage. But Google says nothing fishy is taking place. According to Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, the company's SLA is identical to others' in the industry.
Hit the jump and tell us what you think about Google's SLA.
Image Credit: Pingdom
More like this
zodi
December 11, 2008 at 3:04pm
Basically the google contract allows google to recognize a problem and take corrective action either by swapping to standby hardware, or to let someone know this is a real issue.
Hell at our company its hard enough to get IBM to admit to down time for anything over an hour. Anything less then that is not a breach of contract. Legally speaking it never happened.
10 minutes would be a god send.
jwalch.hawk
December 05, 2008 at 10:48am
I'm inclined to say Pingdom needs to take a chill pill.
Even pingdom's "likely" scenario doesn't seem very likely to me. Generally if there are server issues, you don't see a whole bunch of five minute downtimes through a day or something like that. It's more likely to be something like twenty minutes or more.
Granted, Google's policy allows them to bake the numbers a little bit in that they could in reality be up like 98% of the time and by their method it would count as 99.9% (if the down times were short and spread out). But I don't think it's a wild fabrication by any means.
Also, I'm guessing if Google claims that this SLA is an inudstry standard than it is. This would be something pretty easy to disprove and throw back at their PR guy if it were false, so I can't imagine that they would claim that to be the case if it weren't.
nekollx
December 05, 2008 at 7:50am
i think Ping just has a problem with goggle, my internet, webhost, etc have been known to have a hicup for a miniute or two. Andhey have 99.9 uptime garorentees. Really if its donw for only a few minutes it not always the server your connecting to thats down, sometimes its you!
MeTo
December 05, 2008 at 11:17am
The down time could be your pc the ISP the phone line for dialup or DSL cable that is congested it could be google server the problem is there are to many variables to make such claims.
Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
We introduce Intel's latest class of tablet killers and review 4 of the first Ultra...
Where have all the memorable videogame enemies gone?
This month's issue
Feature
11 Hardware Hacks
Feature
Overclock Your CPU
How-To
Supercharge Your Smartphone
Build It
A Powerful $830 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Analysts: 9-Inch Kindle Fire This Summer http://t.co/QDYApwCZ1 day 2 hours ago
- maximumpc: Micron: DRAM Prices Likely as Low as They're Going to Get http://t.co/fFUWuFOm1 day 5 hours ago
- maximumpc: Yar, Mateys! All Of Pirate Bay Made Available As A Single 90MB Zip File http://t.co/j5LHlXEZ1 day 6 hours ago
