Today Google’s Gmail service was down for at least half an hour leaving thousands of Gmail users high and dry. The extended down time only effected a portion of Gmail users but quickly Twitter feeds were filled with chat about Google’s down time.

Perhaps we put to much faith in Google’s services. Most of Google’s services are web based so users interact with the program on Google’s servers via the internet, rather than running the program from your host computer. This forces Google to continually maintain their server uptimes so services are available to consumers and customers, interruption free.

Most popular hosting services, including Google, boast of reliability, advertising 99.9% server uptimes. At first look this sounds like a very high uptime and makes the hosting service appear very reliable but upon a quick analysis we find that there are 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month, so with 99.9 % up time we are left with roughly 43 minutes of server down time.

When you quantify this claim your server suddenly doesn’t seem as reliable.  We might not feel like 40 minutes is very long but when you are running a business and you rely solely on a web based application you can encounter problems if there is any unexpected server down time.

To help protect yourself and your business from errors and server down time in Google’s applications there are a few simple precautions you can implement that safe guard you against program malfunction and server problems.

My initial recommendation is to set up POP or IMAP forwarding to an email client like Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird. This will ensure that if the web application is down the POP/IMAP feed will be sent to your mail client. For example during Google’s most recent down time the POP/IMAP feed was still running.

Web based applications are not infallible and they are subject to downtimes. Google has many business tools that have become engrained with many business core functions and down time can result in problems. If you rely on these applications having a backup plan can save you and your organization from future embarrassment.