Bye bye Google Apps

Last summer I decided to give up my locally managed Email service and switch to a Premier Edition Google apps account. Sounded great, 25GB of mail storage and guaranteed uptime of 99,9% in any given month!. Well, last night around 19:15 I got this nice '502' error

At 20:00 I started to get a little worried but hey, 0.1% downtime translates to 0.72 hours each month which was roughly within limits. At 23:00 however I wanted action and I tried to find out how to get support. Of course they prefer receiving Emails, so I sent them one, and then another, and another. Around 02:00 the first responses arrived, stating that they are aware of the problem, and that ' our engineers are working diligently to find a solution'. Yeah, right. This morning at 08:15 (as you might have guessed already): still no Email! That's already down to 98.2% availability. Then at 12:14 finally a  sign of life from Google:

"We're aware of a problem with Google Apps Mail access affecting a small number of users. We expect to resolve the problem on October 16th at 6:00pm Pacific Time, although some users may regain access sooner. Please note, that this is an estimate and is subject to change."

Eh, 6:00pm Pacific Time? That's 03:00 the next morning for me, so if they can fix it by then, I will have had a downtime of 32 hours, and an availability of 95.5 %. So then I decided to find out what's in it for me; my guess was that when a company fails to meet its SLA you'll get compensated for that. And yes, you are. You're entitled to receive a Service Credit! Now comes the big joke:

"Service Credit" means: (a) three days of Service added to the end of Your term for the Service, at no charge to You, if the Monthly Uptime Percentage for any calendar month is between 99.0% and 99.9%; or (b) seven days of Service added to the end of Your term for the Service, at no charge to You, if the Monthly Uptime Percentage for any calendar month is between 99.0% and 95.0 %; or (c) fifteen days of Service added to the end of Your term for the Service, at no charge to You, if the Monthly Uptime Percentage for any calendar month is less than 95.0%.

Now that makes me really happy: I'm going to get 7 days of service added! Whoopee, that's exactly $1 !!! Question: would you give up a day and a half of email access for $1? I surely won't, so it's bye bye Google, I'm going back to managing my email internally again.

Update (17:22)

Guess what: Google exceeded my expectations by fixing the problem 10 hours earlier than they initially indicated. Not that I was informed about it; I noticed mail pooring in through a POP account I created in Outlook (yes, I use Outlook, mainly because the stupid Nokia I own doesn't sync with my PC otherwise, and Google Calendar only syncs with Outlook as well). So I was a happy camper again, untill I tried to reply to an email from yesterday:

Well, what can I say? Bye bye Google Apps...