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How Dependant Have You Become On Hosted Solutions?

I am encountering a HUGE problem.  My GMAIL is Down!  When I try to login I get this error:

We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable.

If the issue persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center »

This is bad news and made me wonder, how dependant have we become on hosted solutions?

Hosted solutions are good.  They save you a lot of time and money and allow you to access your data anywhere but what happens when the service goes down?  You’re pretty much screwed.  I for one don’t have backups of all of my emails elsewhere.  That’s a huge problem and something I will have to fix, so to reduce my risk of this dependancy I will create a backup using pop3 to download my emails when the service comes back up.

A lot of us are dependant on some sort of hosted software.  What are you dependant on and how are you going to reduce the risk of your dependancy?

Published inDoing Business

7 Comments

  1. As your aware we are dependant on our affiliate network solution provider.

    It’s a double-edged sword. So many people say switch, it’s easy to say but logistically it’s a big ask, every offer, every affiliate, every tracking link would need to change, we’d need to employ a bunch more staff and the cost would be that much greater.

    When the service goes down (as the internet did at my home yesterday) I just do some real life stuff. It’s easy to become paranoid about these things and it does make you feel physically sick when it happens.

    BTW I can access Gmail no problem….

  2. @Jim – I’m back up and running again, BUT, I still need to take some precautions in case it goes down for much longer. This topic just popped in my head while having the issue, because everyone relies on something that’s sort of out of their control.

  3. yeah, Microsoft Exchange is a way to go. I’ve been using gmail for years, so switching address isn’t an ideal…

    other stuffs, such as back ups, online documents, i hosted myself…

  4. omgyams omgyams

    You could set your gmail account to forward all of your mail to a backup account somewhere else. At least you’d have your shit if you needed it. It’s a short-term solution, at the very least.

  5. xentech xentech

    I’ll be honest I’m pretty dependant on hosted solutions for all sorts of things, web applications get better every month!

    Are many peeps gmail’s down? Has never happened to mine I don’t think.

  6. @Xen – Ive been asking around and no, not a ton of people seem to be down. I guess I’m just lucky. I agree with you though, web apps rock.

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