I guess it comes down to cost versus value but I have had two episodes in the past 24 hours that highlight potential issues with using online services and have given me a crappy day to boot.

1. One of our web hosting companies facilities went down last night at 7.30pm and went back up again at 8.50am this morning. Worst part is that we couldn’t get hold of them to sort it out. It’s the second time it’s happen this year and at £395 per month I may start looking for a new solution. (ASP managed server if you know anyone in the UK).
   This just so happened to coincide with my first Facebook group e-mail - bugger!
2. I love Campaign Monitor for e-mail marketing, but it’s the first of the month, I have three e-shots waiting to go and the system isn’t working after some ‘routine maintenance’. I’ll be fair to them as it’s a great system and very cheap to use but it puts me in a hole right at this moment.

To be fair to both of these issues, it’s cost and systems versus value. I can’t afford to write my own e-mail system and host my own websites, and even if I did, I couldn’t guarantee that it would be working 100% of the time.

As for my hoster’s 99.9% up time guarantee, that’s been blown, but having seen the Service Level Agreement, it would be hard for me to do anything about it anyway. I bet they keep on advertsing their up-time though!