What’s Your “Web Service Tanked” Contingency Plan? | Social Media Explorer.  I commented on this on the site as well.  My key concern is not the service going down, but being at the whim of a “free” service that may decide to automate some processes like abuse handling.  I’m still reliant on external hosting, but I am in control of recovering my content if backed up properly.

I was severely burned by a round of Blogspot automated spammer purging. I was writing a simple blog, hosted by Blogspot, to track my progress toward a certain running goal. I created a decent amount of content which linked back to my running logs. Somehow, I was locked out of my site for several weeks–with no access to my own content, under suspicion of being a spam blog. It took multiple tries through several channels with Google to get my blog released.

That was the nail in the coffin for Blogspot hosted blogs for me. For a time, I continued to use Blogger for FTP-based blogs, but service outages and lack of functionality finally got to me.

There was enough pain for me in a completely non-critical application that I can’t fathom SaaS without a contingency and a stringent SLA for the SaaS application.  This experience has made me aware of the inherent risk in relying on a third party (especially if through a free service) to meet your software needs.