The Problem with Web-based Everything

So, I've been tinkering with the free version of Toodledoo - a web-based GTD task manager, and I was thinking about upgrading to a "pro" account. Unfortunately, they had a storm run through last night, which engaged the generators. When the generators kicked in, something didn't work right, and power was lost. This in turn caused a database crash, which caused it to corrupt, and they are still down now.

Here's what their homepage states right now:

So, here's the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.


Update: Its obviously taking longer than we expected and we are really sorry for that.

Now, I'm not paying anything for the service, and I'm fine with the downtime. However, I don't think I'll be upgrading anytime soon - this outage tells me a few things:

• They don't use UPS's.
• They don't use more than one data center.
• They likely don't manage their own servers.

Again, all of this is fine - it costs money to do all these things, and I understand the decision to not do it. However, when I pay for software as a service, I expect the software and the service to be highly available.