Hi there! Let me first share that I am very impressed with what Buzztouch can do! My organization does not have any experience putting Apps out and I was asked to put something together. Of course had to be fast too. My question is related to availability and uptime experiences of the service you guys have. The way I understand, the App would fail at least partially in case Buzztouch servers go down (or worse, the company pulls the plug completely!)? Our App would not be used to generate revenue or wouldn't be considered mssion-critical, that being said it would still be no good if the service would cease to exist after we launch. Thoughts? Thanks!

Hi in NY: Reasonable and responsible question for sure. a) There are occassions when our backend becomes slow, twice this year it's become 100% offline for an hour or two. Super bogus but not avaoidable. It was slow and painful over the weekend for a few hours but we were quick to remedy the problem - as usual. Most online services are not too proud of this idea but we all suffer from the same 'growing pains.' It's troubling for sure but we can't guarantee anything. Because of this inherant fact of the internet, we do encourage folks to disconnect their apps from our backend if they can. Sometimes they can't for technical reasons (don't fully understand the concept) and sometimes they can't because they love the service so much ;-). Mostly we just want everyone to understand what their getting into. buzztouch v1.4 makes disconnecting very difficult if you don't have a deep understsanding of Objective C (iOS) or Java (Android). buzztouch v1.5 makes this very easy and was a primary reason for it's development. v1.5 is only available to Early Adopters so be sure to get on the list (the link is in your control panel) if offline or diconnected / self-hosting your app's data is important or necessary. b) Pull the plug: Not likley but again possible. It's more likely that we would take a bag full of money from Goolge and sail off into the sunset. Kidding of course (kind of!). We are dedicated to providing this service for as far into the furture as we can forsee. More than 40,000 apps are dependent on our backend so we are incented to continue doing exactly what we've promised so far. We are a small team and do have limited resources but have also been providing online services for more than a decade so we are very confident in our ability. We are geninue about our promise to continue to provide the use of our tools for free for as many folks as we can... think WordPress. If they can do it, so can we. c) Lastly: We are hoping to release buzztouch Server as a free download soon. This release would allow you to host your own control panel and take matters into your own hands if you prefer. Again, good for some, not for all. Hope this helps clarify it for ya...

Buzztouch server? That would be awesome! I would install that in a heartbeat!

David, Many thanks for the elaborated reply, very much appreciated!