Don't use any service provider that does not align well with what is important for your business. If this includes guaranteed service availability and solid customer service and the company in question just can't provide these guarantees, well, don't use them.
It really is that simple.
I have not touched anything Google except for Search and Analytics for probably three years. I learned early-on where my business needs did not align with their offerings and we don't use those services. I couldn't be happier. From my perspective Google is a great company.
There are other approaches to all of the other services. We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. A license of MS Office on every machine isn't a problem if you have a real business, just like a license of the appropriate Adobe suite is almost a must. Tools like GoToMyPC, for the technically challenged are a no-brainer and they are cheap. There are a multitude of cloud storage solutions. And, frankly, for a lot of stuff, there's nothing wrong with hosting your own access-controlled FTP site to share files with your team (although a paid Dropbox account is oh-so-simple).
So, yeah, Google is a good company. Just stick to the stuff that works the way you need it to and you'll be fine.
>We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy.
From what I've heard other people say, running your own mail servers can be described with a lot of colorful vocabulary, though "easy" not being one of them. Do you know how much it costs you guys to run your own mail servers (both in actual "server has power" as well as technical ops cost) compared to using Google Apps? I've heard numbers in the 10x - 100x range.
It really depends on how comfortable you are at Linux systems administration, and how ambitious you want your mail server to be. If you're going to have to rely on any (really, any) of the guides or howtos online, then expect to budget in many hours of problem-solving and knob turning.
We currently spend very little time each month on ongoing maintenance for our mail server, and we have a stack that includes good spam & antivirus systems, webmail, easy user administration, and hourly offsite backups.
But, I've got probably over a hundred hours of my time sunk into all of that, and there's still a lot more I'd like to do to the server.
So, from a billable hour standpoint, you probably can't justify hosting your own mail versus Google Apps (or just about anything else), unless you're specifically looking for functionality that Google doesn't provide.
You don't have to run it yourself if you don't want to.
Plenty of people will take that work of your hands for a reasonable price. Oh and they will give you an actual phone number you can call.
Huh. For some reason, I'd never considered that people might be willing to pay for a remote "on call sysadmin". We already admin a handful of mail servers, that's something we could add to our services.
When you have services like Intermedia.net doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you, it's insanely easy to sell mail as a service. I will say though, Intermedia is a LITTLE trigger happy with their routing security; one of our PC's had a malware infection, already quarantined and was pending removal. Our entire IP range was banned until it got cleaned up, and the machine itself was a DMZ'd test machine that we purposely infect regularly for "war games" etc, so it had no email clients, didn't even send any messages.
There's a reason for this. It occurred to me the other day, after dealing with a stupid hover.com problem, that it has become almost impossible for network admins at different networks to talk to each-other.
I have never, not once, in the five or six years I've been doing network admin work, been able to contact another network admin to report a problem. Instead, I have to go through incompetent and clueless frontline support first, and spend hours or days navigating that until the problem is no longer relevant anymore or I give up.
It became obvious that I wasn't the only one that had given up on contacting network admins when I recently had to deal with a spam issue (same spammer, multiple hosting providers, new technique) -- while I tried following the RBL rules, it was clear that other service providers entirely skipped the "notify the network admin, give them reasonable time to resolve the problem before nominating their block for the RBL" step. the victim networks all became listed on the RBLs within just a few hours of the first waves of spam.
It's just gotten to be too much trouble, nobody bothers anymore, and unfortunately that will have to include me from now on too. If I see bad behavior coming from another network, I won't any longer even try to contact anybody at the other network; I'll just ban their IP and move on.
Your post is spot on and I've felt every frustration you've outlined. I maybe should have clarified my post originally to suggest I'm not entirely suggesting this is a fault of Intermedia, as they don't know our internal systems architecture. But getting the issue resolved and being able to get the message relayed that the machine posed virtually no threat to an admin who could have done something about it was just as much of a chore as you've just explained.
Granted, the hilarious irony in this is that it was Intermedia who pointed out "there's an infected machine" on your network, so all of the wrangling around and sending tracert outputs, just to get a reply weeks later "This IP address is infected" and the resulting "That's what it was? That machine is just for testing, we know it's infected." was a bit of a grind.
Who cares what the multiplier is. If GA costs $1/yr and your own mail server costs $100/yr (just making up these numbers), it's still worth getting right. Just focus on the bottomline cost to yourself, and figure out if it makes sense.
For my personal mail I use Fastmail. $40/year for 10 GB of mail. I have far more faith in things getting resolved with either of those companies than were we to be using GMail and email is too important for me to not have that trust.
Does fastmail include phone support? Their support link takes you to a form and points to online documentation. This seems like it provides less support than Google.
Google Apps works great. It is an incredible product. Google Apps is backed by a 99.9% SLA and they almost hit 99.99% last year. Customer service has improved vastly over the last couple of years and Google now provides 24/7 phone support. Do you get that kind of support running your own servers? No planned downtime? Your suggestions are dated. FTP isn't an easy thing for most users..you still need local programs to support whatever filetypes you are opening.
Many businesses rely on Google Apps..over 5 million to date, including some very big and important companies with extremely smart and technical people making the decision to switch from running their own servers to Google's solutions. Their evaluations of these services go far beyond what anyone here could ever imagine..I know, we setup Google Apps for some very large organizations (over 25,000 employees).
It is a great set of services that can be extremely valuable to organizations small and large.
Don't use any service provider that does not align well with what is important for your business. If this includes guaranteed service availability and solid customer service and the company in question just can't provide these guarantees, well, don't use them.
It really is that simple.
I have not touched anything Google except for Search and Analytics for probably three years. I learned early-on where my business needs did not align with their offerings and we don't use those services. I couldn't be happier. From my perspective Google is a great company.
There are other approaches to all of the other services. We host our own email for a number of domains on different private servers. Easy. A license of MS Office on every machine isn't a problem if you have a real business, just like a license of the appropriate Adobe suite is almost a must. Tools like GoToMyPC, for the technically challenged are a no-brainer and they are cheap. There are a multitude of cloud storage solutions. And, frankly, for a lot of stuff, there's nothing wrong with hosting your own access-controlled FTP site to share files with your team (although a paid Dropbox account is oh-so-simple).
So, yeah, Google is a good company. Just stick to the stuff that works the way you need it to and you'll be fine.