Gmail was down for 30 hours, we were unaffected....

...because we don't use it

It caused consternation though...so here's a lesson for free - this is not worth it:.

In August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Webmail service but also paying Google Apps Premier customers. As a result, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and said it would do better at notifying users of problems.

Because for anything material to you, the refund you get from your SP is usually a fraction of the value you have lost.

Anybody who puts any form of business critical application on a cloud-only basis has their head in the clouds. Email and Office services are such applications. We use Thunderbird so all mails are stored to desktop as well as a webmail servers (plus backup), and two different mail servers, plus a landline and mobile broadband line. We have Open Office on the machines.

That's what you do with any critical services. You ensure redundancy at all bottlenecks. And we still lose connectivity at times.

If you use only Gmail via web (or similar) , with no on-client backup, in any form of service important environment then sorry you are not a Geek, you are an idio....person who needs to stop drinking the Kool Aid.

By the way, it is for these reasons that we believe the next few evolutions of The Cloud will actually be hybrid services. Email s one thing, but imagine losing your Order Book for 30 hours....