Google Apps email down at least 2 days for maintenance

Wednesday, January 19, 2011
author: gdzierzon

I am moving all of my serveral google apps accounts to a provider that actually wants me as a customer.

I manage several websites both for my self and for customers of mine. Since I don't want to be in the business of managing mail servers I have gone with google apps free accounts for the smaller businesses that I manage. After all, that is a great service that google offers to small businesses... or so I thought.

I have been unable to log in to one of my google apps email accounts since almost 48 hours ago. I first tried their solution of waiting a few minutes and then trying again. That of course did not work. Since I have become fairly dependent on this email, I thought I would upgrade the account so that I could get phone support. After working with them I found out that the server that this account is on, is undergoing scheduled maintenance and will not be available for at least 2 days.

IT WAS A PLANNED OUTAGE THAT THEY DID NOT TELL ME ABOUT!!!

I've included their email response to me below...

After investigation, it looks like this account is locked for 2 days due to a scheduled maintenance on the server it resides on. We ensure that prior to a scheduled maintenance, all paying customers are not affected. However, since this account was not a paying account at the time the maintenance started, the account is affected by the maintenance period. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause - your data is safe and secure, but unfortunately you will be unable to access this account until the maintenance period ends.

I understand the idea of giving higher priority to a paying customer than those with FREE accounts, but what is being implied in the email I received seems outrageous to me. Here are the problems I have with their response.

Free accounts aren't actually free. They are paid for by advertisers and we put up with the advertisements as a cost of keeping the service free.
- I'm fairly certain that google makes more than $50 per year on each free account, so in that sense, it's actually in their best interest to keep the account free
Google offers the service as a free service, they must know that people who set up a free account will get just as dependent on their email as those that pay
- I can think of few people who have email accounts where a 2 day outage is even remotely acceptable
Planned server maintenance should NEVER take service out for 2 entire days
- If the maintenance actually takes that long, then you plan to copy the server to a temporary server while the other is being worked on - it is preposterous to think that google would run maintenance on a server as if they only had one server available to them
If the maintenance was actually planned, then at a very MINIMUM I would expect that they let me know that my email would be down for 2 days
- But as noted above, a 2 day outage is simply not acceptable, even for a free account
Maintenance started on my account on a Monday morning.
- I have been without critical email communication on this account for all of Monday and Tuesday, two days when a lot of business is done.
- Couldn't it have been planned for a Saturday and Sunday? Maybe they thought that free accounts get used more on the weekends and paid accounts get used more on weekdays.

I can't think of any scenario where what was describe to me would ever sound like a good idea to a CIO, CEO or any other business person. If I were to run a business like this, where I offer a service for free, and then randomly tell the customer that they can't use it, I wouldn't be in business very long. I guess that maybe they've gotten just a little too big to remember what customer service is.

Maybe they think that this will give me the incentive to become a paying customer. They are absolutely right, I will become a paying customer... but not to them. I'm looking for other solutions to take my business elsewhere.

If you are considering opening a google apps account, I highly recommend looking elsewhere. It'll work great most of the time, but you may find, that at a time when you need it most, they will have decided to do a 2 day maintenance on your server. Hey, but then you can write yuor own little blog entry too.

I'm just one customer, but I'm one who is moving on.