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Comment by msy | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely why I think it's insane that people trust their email - the nexus of their online presence, normally the key to every account and their primary communication tool for everything from conversations to account statements to a free service. It's not 1996 anymore, this stuff matters. I pay for Rackspace email. When I have a problem I can call a human and get an answer. As far as I'm concerned it's a bargain.

Google doesn't do human, it doesn't matter if it's a free gmail account, a serious-money adwords account or your entire business on apps, you're just a number if something goes wrong you're on your own, shouting at the unmoving monolith.

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I've got Google Apps for Business, and when all of our mailboxes were unavailable I contacted Google at the number listed on their website, talked to a human, got it resolved in about 30 minutes.

I'm not sure that they followed the support instructions, the email excerpt said to reply if that wasn't the right solution but it just says they sent another support email.

It probably would have been better to call, I mean you are paying for 24/7 phone and email support.

I haven't had any problems with getting support through Google Apps for Business, I might be an exception though.

Not that it matters much, but I called them several times, and replied to the original email. But I think you're focusing too much on the specifics.

The problem is that your mail is crucially important to you, but rather less important to Google. In such a scenario, it makes sense to change your plan to something under your control, even if it's painful.

That's my experience too. Hardly ever goes wrong, telephone support was friendly and on-the-money, problem quickly solved.

So, let's have some stats? I mean, does a paid for provider go down more or less? What about loosing data? I'm not so sure Gmail comes out that bad

The point isn't so much whether or not Google comes out bad, it's whether you have someone to talk to that can actually fix the problem when something happens.

There are providers that can give you various guarantees, response times and that will make key personnel available to you (at a price). Google is not one of those providers.

Yeah, and how much of your time is spent going over obvious nonsense with that human on the telephone line?

This person was a paying customer, and did get human support. From the article:

    We got back several emails explaining that they are very sorry,
    but while they are working on retrieving the file, they can’t 
    promise any dates or times.

It's easy to miss that, as most of the article was a copy-paste of a useless email. Looks like after that, he did get the human support you're talking about.

Also it's not fair to single out just Google here. SalesForce, Microsoft and many others offer cloud based solutions. Any cloud solution has the risk of them screwing up something in their data center and losing your data. Stay local and in control if the data is so mission critical.

Similar argument could be used against staying local: are your engineers as capable at data retention as Google's? What if your in-house people screw it up? Will you have some remedy that isn't available to you if Google had screwed it up?

If your in-house people screw it up then it means you don't value the data very much. If you say you value the data but don't act like it, it means you don't value the data.

If you really, actually do value the data, then the best way to assure its safety is to take control of it. One company I worked had a practice of taking a set of offsite backups to an emergency facility, restoring the data and doing some sample processing. Every month they did this, without fail. That's caring about your data.

You avoided the question: what if something goes wrong with your in-house process? Is there anything you can do vis-à-vis your employee that you can't do to Google? Is that worth the price of keeping that person on your payroll, drawing benefits, driving up your costs? Would you fire them? Worth the employment claims risk?

These are not binary decisions. People vastly overestimate the value of doing things in-house. Most of the candidates for those "in-house" data management jobs couldn't cut it at Google. Why not leverage Google's HR and recruitment, training, and expertise in infrastructure operations to your benefit, esp. when you consider:

(1) that your own hires offer you no better protection; and

(2) backup solutions are necessarily imperfect.

I didn't mean to avoid that question. I think I answered it implicitly: if you care about it then take control of it.

There's a lot that you can do about your employee that you can't to with Google. You can educate them, align their motivations with yours, etc. You can review the process and make sure it doesn't depend on one person. The list goes on.

Of course there are times to outsource. Times when practicality makes it necessary, when money makes it desirable, and so on. I do not take issue with the very idea. Sometimes it's the right choice. But sometimes it's the wrong choice.

Cool. It sounds like we draw that line in different places. I think your comments about aligning motivations is universal, and applies regardless of whether or not a services is sourced. My position is the illusion of "control" by assigning tasks to full time employees is almost never worthwhile in light of the enormous costs and risks of putting someone on your payroll. When a disaster strikes and you're caught empty-handed, you'll either be firing an employee, or firing a vendor. It's a lot easier and is less risky and it costs less to fire and replace a vendor.

But if a problem occurs in-house, I feel like it's under my control!

I'd rather have a 1% chance of losing my valuable data if I feel in control than a 0.1% chance of losing it while feeling like there is nothing I can do about it.

Google makes it possible to backup your data by yourself. There's nothing stopping your from archiving your email, docs, etc.

The op was a paid customer. It apparently didn't matter much.

You're missing the point. The problem is not that the service is free (especially since as a free service, Google's uptime probably leaves all their competitors in the dust).

The problem is just having your email stored outside your private network.

It makes a lot of sense for startups and small companies, less so when they start growing and they can afford a staff of sysadmins.

This attitude drives me nuts. Why would anyone want a staff of sysadmins? You're almost certainly buying (at a high capital outlay) the B-team when you can rent the A-team for next to nothing.

There's nothing magical about your "private network". These days corporate networks are chock full of holes and ripe with hypocritical security priorities.

Use Google apps for business ($50/year/user). Hire one of the many companies that archive Google Apps data.

It is total folly to think that you'll buy better security by paying for your own infrastructure and a small army to run it. That's like claiming the only safe automobile is one that you and your friends build.

As I said in my comment, this is never going to fly for any company past a certain size. There is just too much confidential and legally sensitive stuff going through your email on a daily basis. Especially if you want to go public at some point (or even be acquired).

As a lawyer, I respectfully scoff at this response. The exchange servers running the biggest companies in the world are sourced to third party providers. I love how people will put their "legally sensitive" stuff in the hands of a $60K/year sysadmin, but not in the hands of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure operations specialist that also happens to manage the world's best index of Internet content. I really struggle to follow the logic.

It's the application. Gmail is a hosting service for your email, but it's also a fabulous intuitive email webapp. I am sure many companies/people would purchase an internally hosted gmail appliance (heck, maybe a whole google apps appliance), if they could. I think that's one reason that many of us end up in this situation.

How much do you pay for your Rackspace email?

I pay $1 per mailbox per month. The current price is $2 per month per mailbox, still a deal. Rackspace Email (formerly MailTrust) is incredibly reliable, backed up daily, good spam filters, and excellent 24/7/365 support. In the past ~3 years I've only experienced a single downtime incident of about 10 minutes.

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