Photo credit: Carl Silver

Whenever a big service like Aweber, 1ShoppingCart or Gmail goes down, it is common to hear many frustrations among Internet Marketers. Especially today when social networks amplify things like this. I’ve often caught many peers complaining and some (not peers) can get pretty ugly over a few glitches here and there.

But you know, we should all be thankful instead that we don’t have to fix it. When they go down, we can sit back and watch or go do something else productive. When they go down, we don’t lose sleep. Well… if its your shopping cart you will lose sleep a little but its nothing compared to having to fix it yourself. Also, it’s so much easier to explain to the customers – it’s not my fault 😉

Jokes aside, the point is, sometimes, even I find myself complaining and I think I’m spoilt. In the past, small business owners pretty much had to fix their own software or pay good money for someone in the know to do it for them. They also couldn’t afford the many cool, absurdly affordable and free software we enjoy today.

Yes, it is very frustrating when you need to send an email and Aweber is not working. It is infuriarating when you plan a launch and your shopping cart short circuits on you. After all, you paid good money for the services and you just want it to work. But… sitting back and thinking deeper into this. I’m glad they have the resources to hire talented and often expensive engineers to work on ‘my’ account. People whom I could not afford or would take me forever to figure out on my own. Besides, all computer systems are flawed because they were built by imperfect human beings. The fact that we can achieve 99.99% uptime regularly is a great achievement. Even the human body which is a pretty remarkable piece of engineering can’t operate on 99.99% uptime.

That said, if you are subscribing to a service that your business relies on and the uptime is less than stellar, you’d definitely want to start shopping around. Thankfully for me, most of the services I use have good uptime.