Reliance on the Google for mail

For a bunch of reasons -- laziness and lack of experience in the modern realm -- I rely on my email being hosted by someone else.Sure, I can set things up myself if I really wanted to, but it would be more than a pain in the ass. Between making sure I don't get used as an open relay to ensuring that my email can actually be sent (since most mail servers are hesitant to accept mail from random servers).In my case I rely on the google.The has some plusses and minuses.The big plus is that I got grandfathered in with the Google Apps for Your Domain thing. My mail hosting for vec.com is free. It works well most of the time.Then there is the other side of the "free" sword.Today a couple of times I wasn't able to get to my mail. An outage was happening. And since I have free, there isn't an SLA for the uptime of the service. The outages were only a few minutes long each time, but I realized how helpless I felt at that moment.There is still upside though. If it were my server... I wouldn't have anyone on call except me. I would have to fix it myself. While I wouldn't be helpless, I would be the only help around.