I’ve been having a lot of trouble lately with services that I have provided by other people; DSL, web hosting, email applications, central spam checking services, and so on. It has not been a good week to trust that outside service providers won’t let me down. Sure, some of the service providers have been extremely helpful, and even candid when the problem was their fault, and I appreciate that. My telco’s tech support admitted that they messed up and then they corrected the problem within about 15 minutes after I called in; not something I can hold against them, especially since I was expecting to be told to wait until monday when business services open or something. Moving on a friday is a bad idea when most business services are still only available monday through friday…

In the past couple minutes, my personal email is out;

GMail is not happy today; this isn’t something I’ve ever seen from them before, but it’s something I should be prepared for. Hosting applications out of your reach is not typically a safe option. I have no long GMail will be down, but while it is, I don’t have access to my mailbox. Yes, I could download all of my email into a local mail client, but that defeats the benefits that I expect to get out of a hosted web application; portability. I enjoy the fact that I can look at the same email regardless of the computer I happen to be logged into at the moment. The same goes for my del.icio.us bookmarks; I could make them in my browser, but then I can’t get to them from work. It’s for this same reason that I use bloglines.

Pubsub is still stuck on February 9, after they were hit with a flurry of bogus data from someone interested in gaming the system. Technorati continues on, apparently fine. In passing I wonder if one application hosting company might, as a method of "corporate" espionage, might attack the other system, bringing it down. Had Technorati bombarded Pubsub, turning the blog stats Cold War into an active conflict? Sure, more than likely it was one of those crazy SEO types, seeing if they could hit the top ten in the linkranks, but who is to say that the competition wouldn’t make attempts to take down your site?

Let’s take a look at something a bit more important than personal email; my Gmail inbox is important to me, but it’s not life or death; it’s only a minor inconvenience.  My corporate web site is another story; it’s an important service that needs to keep running, one way or another. If I use a web based CMS product to maintain my site, such as Marqui’s product, and their service goes down, will I have problems?  So long as you’re not in a big rush to update your corporate website, all is well.  If you have a time sensitive update that needs to be made; you’ve just fired your CFO, or you have noticed information on the site that isn’t public yet, or anything else that could be embarassing, you want that change made now.  If the CMS is down, and you believed the hype that said you could run your website with zero technical skill, and you’ve laid off your web design staff and systems admin, you’re dead in the water until the hosted application comes back online.  It’s not fun to be at the hands of someone that you can’t smack, and with many hosted applications, there’s typically not a path for migration away from the service.  I suppose that with Marqui, that’s not a big deal, as all of the data is on your own servers.  The "I’m leaving" option, where you take your ball and go home is easier in such a situation than with an option like Salesforce where all your data is on the hosting company’s servers.

Maybe I can get more on what Marqui does internally to try to keep things running.