Free Google Apps Limitations

Google Apps Premier Edition is worth the $50/year just for the enterprise Gmail featured with 99.99% SLA on uptime.

This site had an image of 1 billion dollars would look like stacked on pallets and quickly registered around 261 Diggs but the user had the image hosted on a free Google site located at http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/ since they were using the free version it crashed with a warning notification shown.

“We are sorry, but this site has exceeded its bandwidth limit at this time. Please try again later. For more information, see Google Sites help.”

This error page shows the some of the common issues with SaaS and how any issues or errors are very visible and often not explained correctly. If you are using a free hosted version you cannot expect the same level of support, features and bandwidth.  This massive amount of traffic failed because it is likely that they were  using the free Google Apps suite, but a link such as why not upgrade to Google Apps Premier Edition and never see this error again…

The worry is that this Digg stories combined with their recent push into Promoting their Google Apps Premier Edition to their Reseller partners can produce distrust for their products. SaaS news did a short article on the renewed push by Google to beat IBM, Yahoo & Microsoft in the online market.

With more than 1 million business customers using Google Apps, Google decides it’s time to broaden its cloud computing ecosystem by letting other businesses resell its Google Apps Premier Edition suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Now vendors will be able to resell GAPE for $40 per user, a 20 percent discount from Google’s $50 per-user, per-year fee. GAPE includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and other apps.

A clarification, im using Google Apps Premier Edition and its one of the best SaaS solutions that I found in the market, its worth the $50/year just for the enterprise Gmail featured with 99.99% SLA on uptime.