Updated: Folks, if you were burned by last night’s Gmail outage and pay for your service, don’t despair, Google has a service-level agreement in place to atone for the loss of productivity. The downside is that atonement comes in the form of a 3-day credit for service that’s worth about 41 cents. Update: But don’t worry, Google is feeling generous, and will offer you the maximum 15-day credit.
Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer at web site performance monitoring firm AlertSite, notes that Google offers paid users a credit should the site experience below 99.9 percent availability each month. From Godskind’s email:
Assuming the reports about today’s outage of 2.5 hrs are true that would put Feb uptime at ~ 99.6%. This is a breach of Google’s SLA and the penalty is 3 days of service credit.
Google charges $50 annually for each license, which means that the credit for the 2.5 hours of downtime equals out to about 41 cents per employee. That’s not enough to buy you a postage stamp. Because most people would scoff at such an offer, Google has extended it to a 15-day credit worth a more reasonable $2.05. Normally, the credit’s not enough to buy a postage stamp, but now you can get a value meal or two. However, for those who want to claim their credit, Godskind notes that you have to let Google know within 30 days.
I thought is was just my Internet or browser or something. It’s pretty scary how much some of us rely so heavily on the big G.
So, if Google’s SLA offers such a paltry credit, why not find a service that costs more than $50/year and has a better SLA. As long as the service is running fine, it’s only worth $50/year but by golly when it’s down it’s costing me thousands! Does the value of the service somehow become greater than it’s price when it’s down?
It’s hardly fair to criticize Google for their small outage credit when you pay just $50/year for the service.
My email is still not coming up yet. When will this be corrected? If you could let me know on my husbands email which is mattpeelen@hotmail.com Thank you Sandy Peelen
Sandra,
Someone will get right on that for you!