Last week, Google Analytics went down. The way Google puts in in its AnalyticsBlog, “Last week there were some temporary delays in data processing. Please note that all data was still collected and no data was lost. Your reports should now be fully updated.”

But this brings up a good question for everyone who uses hosted analytics applications. What do you do when you are in the midst of a major campaign that you are tracking on an hourly basis and your service goes down? Google seems to have been able to get the reports updated, but then again, it’s Google.

Before you sign up for a hosted solutions, I’d suggest asking the vendor about service outages, just as you would your web host. Web analytics can be a mission critical tool for many companies, and indeed will become more so in the years ahead as corporations catch on to the true power of understanding and applying this data. But an outage could cost you dearly if you are depending on the data to make daily, or even hourly decisions.