Meh, I've had my Gmail for a little over 6 years now. This is the first time I ever remember having this problem. (My Gmail is back up now, by the way.) I'll take this frequency over the effort it takes to maintain my own mail server any day.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by icebraining on Monday December 10, 2012 @06:08PM
(#4902103)
What effort? After setup, it just works.
I doubt any self-hosted service is going to be more reliable than gmail.
Going on 11 years here with no real issues.
Gmail going down for a few hours each year doesn't count as 'real issues', IMHO..
Or maybe you have so few users, that when it does go down no one notices?
Monitoring is a beautiful thing.
So you're telling me that in 11 years, your server has never been down, even for a reboot, software update or hardware failure?
Going on 11 years here with no real issues.
Define "no real issues" cos I would define GMail going down for some users in parts of the world for a short period of time as "no real issue".
Servers and services are not the same thing. I always had more than one machine, each in different geographical areas. Shell scripts kept mail stores in sync, and stupid DNS tricks were used to direct users to servers that were alive. The overall costs were low too. I'd convince the ISP I was working for to let me colocate a pair of old desktops, and trade one with a friend I'd never met face to face.
To clarify my other statement, the biggest "issue" i've had is during a failure of the primary MX messages marked as read would sometimes revert back to being unread for a few minutes.
I run my own mail server, but it's far from justifiable on a pure uptime basis. I don't have HA configured, so my mail (which serves <10 users on a box in colo) goes down for 2-3 minutes ~4-10 times per year when I reboot. Even worse, I don't really announce downtimes, but just randomly reboot it late at night if I've upgraded something important.
Sure, but you have 8-30 minutes of annual downtime, all planned by you:) Not too bad;)
That's best-case. I have backup-mx, but no real failover for imap or normal smtp (other than reading mailspool directly on the backup mx). I used to do a crazy flood-fill thing with 3 servers smtp forwarding mail and marking it, but doing mail HA correctly is kind of hard (and then keeping mailstore synced from imap in sync, too).
Yeah. We use glusterfs to handle the IMAP sync between multiple VMs for HA IMAP. SMTP MX clustering is pretty straightforward in comparison:)
How well would glusterfs work across the Internet? Doing local HA with some kind of SAN seems fine, but the thing I'm trying to solve is "entire datacenter goes down, make the user have no more pain than making a new imap connection". It seems like something that would really need to be handled inside IMAP (using some crazy backing store for mail, like a database) to be done well, but maybe filesystem level replication with maildir would be enough.
I wish there were some "best practices in systems administration" for different services, ranging from simple (just set up imap/dovecot) through complex (gmail-scale), per service.
There's been pretty good focus on how to do http, dns, and some database services, but not as much recently on smtp, imap, etc.
glusterfs would be fine for your situation. There's just some tuning you'll want to do to handle the WAN situation without performance hits.
So your web mail interface is always down... I'm still sending and receiving Google Apps mail through IMAP, so we're currently at parity (except I've never had to manage my email server or deal with spam).
Re:Gmail.com was down
by icebraining on Monday December 10, 2012 @06:19PM
(#4902176)
So your web mail interface is always down...
Why? There are Free webmail solution you can install on your own servers.
And they are all horrendous.
That's not exactly a rational reason. You're really going to struggle to beat Google's uptime.
The reason I host my own mail because I want to own and control my data.
I think more appropriate link would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821928. Gmail downtime is still negligible WRT maintaining your own mail server. But the problem is the downtime of ecosystem built around it.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by lucian1900 on Monday December 10, 2012 @12:03PM
(#4900066)
Won't your own server also have downtime?
it does. When I want it to, not when I don't want it to.
What? If keeping uptime of a server was as easy as wishful thinking, we'd see a lot more of REAL 99.9% uptime.
The trick is to want it to be down when you notice that it's down.
I like it, for my next hosting company: We don't have downtime, just unscheduled maintenance.
That's called Enterprise Hosting and it comes at E10k/server/month excluding bandwidth. I wish I was joking.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by icebraining on Monday December 10, 2012 @06:17PM
(#4902160)
"One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king
went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people
to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the
right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."
"Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once
he had asked it.
"You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of
government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."
"When will that be?" inquired the little prince.
"Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky
almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty
minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!"
"I meant to do that!"
Re:Gmail.com was down
by sliverstorm on Monday December 10, 2012 @12:26PM
(#4900302)
I think what he's trying to say is his downtime is planned - kernel upgrades, configuration changes, that sort of thing.
This is both somewhat true and somewhat not true. He's still vulnerable to failure of the hosting equipment and attacks from crackers. But, when he's the only admin, there's nobody else to fat-finger the server out of action, and if he only logs into the shell for service he will never fat-finger outside of planned service.
Hardware breakages and Zero-Day exploits usually tend to show up at most inconvenient times. I'd recommend everybody to not own an email server from a pure business perspective, unless you're a mail server admin anyways. There's so much time you can sink in it and still not achieve the level of security and uptime a quality email host will reach for much less money.
Now, there are arguments to run your own mailserver - you get to configure it exactly the way you want, you might see it as a hobby, ... But from a pure financial point of view it doesn't make sense.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by sliverstorm on Monday December 10, 2012 @01:10PM
(#4900573)
I know. If you read my comment, you should notice I did not pretend attackers are not a threat.
Right, I somehow missed that part. Sorry about that :)
I know what he meant, but it's not like google is improvising with gmail. The site is already up by the way, it's been years since they have a more than 5 minute downtime. Also, you can never dream of having the same kind of redundancy as gmail will have nor the collective man hours spent in the project. I don't hate the idea of self hosting your mail, I just think it's ridiculous to say you'll have a better service than gmail when you have much better arguments like privacy, control and ownership.
Availability covers data loss and account cancellations out of the blue, which has happened to a friend of mine at least. this is one of the reasons I self host.
Also, the machine is in the same lan as me so connectivity is never a problem (unless the cat chews through the ethernet cables again).
So you have redundant internet connections, back-up power generators, a high availability cluster, etc? That seems like a lot of money just to host your own mail server.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by danielweber on Monday December 10, 2012 @01:30PM
(#4900688)
- I've run my home server. They would crash randomly and usually when something else in the house like a water heater had broken.
- I've run pay servers in the cloud. Then they magically disappear because the expiration date on my credit card updated and the best way for GoDaddy to tell me was to wipe it and then send me an email.
- I've tried free servers. I got what I paid for.
Whatever problems GMail has (and it does have problems), it's not those. Absolutely everything else has left a taste of ashes in my mouth.
Pay for servers from someone other than GoDaddy--almost anyone else, really. Home servers are a really bad solution for anything remotely important, but shared hosting from the likes of Dreamhost, VPS from a company like Linode, or EC2 instances from Amazon are all fast, reliable, and cheap.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by danielweber on Monday December 10, 2012 @09:19PM
(#4902747)
It was actually Dotster, not GoDaddy. I misspoke.
I don't mind paying, but what happens if there is a disruption in payment methods? I'm busy, and I'm also spread very thin on "things I can concentrate on." If my credit card expires without me noticing, I don't want all code and data on the VPS to vanish on me.
Your credit card expiring will presumably cause problems with more than one service; I recommend trying really hard to keep track of that date. (There must be a calendar you can put it in?) Most good hosts will disconnect you before wiping your drive, and will send you several emails (over the course of months) before that happens. But if whatever you're doing now works, even better!
Redundant connection - check 3g. Backup supply - check (fucking big aps). Ha cluster - yes i can fail to a vm on my desktop.
I use gmail via IMAP on mutt and it still works fine, although the Web UI is giving 502 and other various errors. I guess it's just an issue with the front-end, not the mail server itself.
I switched from hosting my own server and using local mail providers to Gmail since they had never been able to provide sufficient reliability (uptime, spam filtering, mail delivery). I use, however, Gmail with my own domain name since I want to be able to change to another provider if necessary.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by JeremyMorgan on Monday December 10, 2012 @12:00PM
(#4900028)
Yup. I'm entirely too reliant on Google products myself. My business not so much but personally I am pretty reliant on them.
Re:Gmail.com was down
by state_machine on Monday December 10, 2012 @12:09PM
(#4900137)
fwiw, gmail's imap servers seem fine -- I'm still getting emails in sparrow.
What do you use for webmail?
Re:Gmail.com was down
by jamesbrennan on Monday December 10, 2012 @12:21PM
(#4900253)
I host my own email as well and have been very happy with Roundcube - clean and fast, no bells and whistles.
Thread from the other day:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886236