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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

I find that most of these are overstated though. Uptime, in particular. What's to say your server will have better uptime than Google?

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It won't, but everyone will like to think it will. If the internal mail server goes down, you fix it. If Google's goes down you're powerless and waiting.

You have more control over the uptime if you control the server. If gmail goes down, all you can do is twiddle your thumbs.

I guess, but it seems like the engineering approach would be to figure out how much downtime is tolerable, compare your IT to GMail, and depending on respective downtimes take a look at the cost and feature equations, instead of reacting with fear (which is, to me, basically what the 'twiddle-thumbs' argument boils down to). I know it doesn't work like that in reality, but it should.

It's not fear to react this way, but a desire to be able to fix things.

If there is a downtime on your self-hosted platform you can decide how much effort/time/money to spend to fix it, depending on how urgent it is to you.

If your email goes down, and you need to access an old email RIGHT NOW, you have numerous options; get in a taxi NOW, go to data centre, remove hard drive, pull of that one file that will save the business. Or hire the best person you can find for a very short term contract. Or if the email isn't important you can wait till the morning or whatever. With Google hosted email, no matter how much money you have available, you cannot get it fixed quicker.

Self-hosting means if things go tits up, you can have some say over how quickly it gets fixed.

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