Google Apps Now Guarantees 99 Percent Uptime

Google prides itself on the stability of its products, but doesn't make any promises for the ones it offers for free. Downtime does happen and people have to deal with it. On the enterprise front, though, this doesn't fly, since it's a paid service, Google offers customers affected by outages compensation on most occasions.

But the company is now amending its service level agreement (SLA), to now guarantee 99.9 percent availability while getting rid of planned downtime and also counting smaller periods of outages.

"We're removing the SLA clause that allows for scheduled downtime. Going forward, all downtime will be counted and applied towards the customer's SLA," Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director, announced.

"We are the first major cloud provider to eliminate maintenance windows from their service level agreement," he added.

"We're also amending our SLA so that any intermittent downtime is counted. Previously, a period of less than ten minutes was not included. We believe any instance that causes our users to experience downtime should be avoided -- period," he also said.

There are only a couple of changes, but they are significant when taken together. There is now no provision for planned downtime so any update or change to the underlying software has to be made without disrupting service.

What's more, any periods of unavailability will now be counted, no matter how small. Before, Google only counted serious outages, lasting 10 minutes or more.

But there's a reason why Google is guaranteeing 99.9 percent availability even with the stricter provisions, Gmail is already more stable than that.

Last year, Gmail had 99.984 availability overall, for both regular and business users, way above the 99.9 percent threshold. This amounts to just seven minutes of downtime per month. Of course, most real world issues only lasted a few seconds or so and added up to the average of seven minutes.