A few of my co-workers an I were chatting recently, and wondered what kind of economic (and physical) impact Google could have if they chose to just shut down for a day.
There’s no Service Level Agreement between Google and the world that says they’ll be there, at least none that I’ve seen or heard of. Just think, though: all those hundreds of thousands of servers being turned off for 24 hours. Think of the electric bill they wouldn’t have to pay?
And wouldn’t every other search provided be thrilled? Certainly they’ve thought about it, and their datacenters can handle the load if Google suddenly went black, right?
Course, if their datacenters couldn’t handle the load, they could have some major problems, maybe even servers having physical problems: melt-downs, crashed drives, horched switches. It’s an interesting thought.
And Google could then happily turn back on after their day off, collecting all the traffic everyone else had lost.
Maybe I’m sick and twisted, but I think it’d be an interesting social experiment.