bjojade said:
"Well, if you are using your .Mac account for business" ...

... then you are violating the terms of service. And are a fool.

.Mac is not an enterprise-class service (though the upgrade to MobileMe could change that). It's a consumer-class service, which means that small outages in the middle of the night (as most of them are) aren't any big deal.

Hopefully what we are seeing is an attempt by Apple to have MobileMe go through its "teething troubles" stage NOW rather than later. As a .Mac member since Jan 2000 I can honestly say I've been satisfied with the service overall till now, and yes this month has been a little frustrating. But when I think of the way most big corporations have let me down/inconvenienced me over the years, Apple is still the best of the bunch by far.

The .mac membership agreement can be found here
http://www.mac.com/1/membership_terms.html

".Mac has been designed for personal use and is not intended to be used to host e-commerce businesses conducting commercial sales and/or transactions over the Internet, including, but not limited to, any online store or shop, or software distribution. "

You can still use it as a tool to communicate via e-mail with your clients. Something that I do for my side gig.

I have every reason to assume MobileMe will be more reliable, as Apple is moving the infrastructure into their own data center - which are the moving pains we are experiencing right now.

I wish people would stop bitching about irrelevant minutiae, considering what Apple is getting ready, and the benefits of the new service.

It's just the usual ungrateful idiots.

I have every reason to assume MobileMe will be more reliable, as Apple is moving the infrastructure into their own data center - which are the moving pains we are experiencing right now.

Where has it been reported that they are moving to their own data center?

And since the servers are all the same, how is it magically going to be more reliable? I seriously doubt all of Apple's issues are with the internet connection dying at their current location.

And can it really be that hard to
(a) Announce a shutdown (everyone else manages to release this information up-front during an upgrade)
or
(b) keep the services running while setting up their new space?

I wish people would stop bitching about irrelevant minutiae, considering what Apple is getting ready, and the benefits of the new service.

It's just the usual ungrateful idiots.

I'm sorry. h***, we're only paying $100 a year. Why should anyone expect such a pay service to be up 100% of the time, or even be told when it will be down. You'd only expect that kind of service from those lame-a** companies that offer such things at cheaper rates, if not free.

I have been generally satisfied with .Mac and I use it as my primary, non-office, email. But I really needed it on Monday. The outgoing mail wouldn't work, yet the .Mac web site said all was well. Finally, after a half hour with technical support, they agreed that the .Mac server was having problems. Until then, I wasn't sure at which ended the problem was. I definitely was unhappy.

See. And look at how much trouble, irritation, and manpower Apple could save (both on its end and on its customer's end) if they just were open about the issues and let people know when the system was actually going to be down.

As others have pointed out, the problem isn't that there are outages. The problem is that any responsible service provider would be giving advanced notice to their customers of planned, and even just potential, outages due to the upgrades they are putting in place to allow people to plan accordingly. Otherwise people are stuck having to figure out on their own if it's a problem with their computer, something they should report, or just sit on their hands until Apple finishes their upgrades.

At my company the engineers are absolutely forbidden to perform any work on a production system during weekdays unless it's an emergency fix. They work evenings and weekends for all upgrades. Apparently Apple's engineers are not bound by such restrictions.

"Apple is moving the infrastructure into their own data center"

iTools was built out in Apple's Valley Green 3 Data Center, being initially positioned as an Apple owned ISP. After a year or two of the free "WhyTools?" .Mac was launched (the rebranded same old thing) at which point the daily outages couldn't go on (it's OK to f*** up when it's a free service: not so much once you start asking $$ for it). Still in VG3.

.Mac and MobileMe are still hosted at Apple's data centers in Cupertino and Elk Grove, but the "head end" delivery from these centers to the Internet has been moved to co-location facilities at AT@T and MAEWest using GigaMAN circuits.

We're being routed to:
http://www.mac.com/unavailable/