If you missed that Google had a 2.5-hour Gmail outage yesterday, you were probably hiding under a rock, or possibly in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. Every major tech blog and news outlet was on it (not to mention Twitter users).

It was night-time in the US, which limited the impact there, but the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. For example, in Europe the outage started at 9:30 in the morning.

Google has now put a number on how much the potential productivity loss for Gmail users was worth.

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It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.

We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?

Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.

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We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.

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Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.

It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.

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The website of the digital content delivery (file sharing) service Yousendit was unavailable for 5 hours and 15 minutes yesterday (November 17).

The downtime was divided into four outages happening over a six-hour period that started soon after 7 p.m. CET (1 p.m. US EST). The shortest outage lasted 30 minutes and the longest lasted 2 hours and 25 minutes.

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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

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The January 2008 issue of Microsoft’s TechNet Magazine features a review of Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. TechNet Magazine is delivered to 100,000 IT professionals. A few quotes from the review: I’ve said this before, and I simply can’t stress it enough: a proactive approach to systems administration will result in less stress and will help [...]

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Ok, let’s retract that headline at once. If you’re a SaaS provider, especially a really big one, having a backup facility makes an awful lot of sense. When you provide a service over the internet you have an obligation to your customers to do your best to assure that your service is always available (or [...]

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Hosted applications have been gaining a lot of popularity lately. The term everyone is using for this way of delivering software is SaaS, Software as a Service, which was definitely one of the big buzzwords of 2006. There are plenty of examples, such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, 37signal’s Basecamp, Salesforce.com, not to mention the [...]

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