Sean's Blog

I don’t particularly care for GMail, and I don’t use it much either, but there’s a bit of humor to be found when it goes down. Providing anything with more than three nines of uptime (99.9%) takes a lot of effort and money, especially when a system is as large, and presumably as complex, as Google’s. The expense of designing a system that is guaranteed to be up 100% of the time is huge, and NO ONE is going to pay the premium to go from 99.8-99.9% to 100%, despite Jason Kaneshiro stating that “Web-based email with 100% uptime. Promise it. Charge for it (it would be worth paying for). And deliver.” I’m sorry Jason, but if you saw the bill for a system with uptime that is truly 100%, you’d have a stroke. That, I can guarantee.