When we read in the the news a huge profit making company has been hiding things to avoid tax in the UK or simply not paying the tax they should be, we generally feel anger towards the company, however with Google we believe we should look at what they do for the people in the World – for FREE.

Give Google a break

Coffee companies hit the news and because they sell coffee that everyday people purchase it is easy to quickly get angry about this due to the fact that they are not adding value to our life.

Today in the new headlines it states that Google has agreed to pay £130 million in back taxes to the UK tax authorities. This payment is to cover the money that is owed since 2005. This tax cost has been calculated following a six year inquiry by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

We work with Google and have an inside view of what they actually do to provide FREE services to users across the globe and for this reason when we read the headlines we don’t feel the same anger towards the situation.

Google is a giant when it comes to business and profits, but they also provide a service that is taken for granted that is used everyday by billions of people all over the world for FREE.

A lot of what we do in the world we live in today involves something online and due to this things can go wrong or cyber criminals can attack taking things offline and when this happens we find out how important this service or product is to our life.

With all the new technology available we can control our homes when away including heating, plugs and watch CCTV to check all is ok and this is only possible thanks to the internet.

One of the biggest things that we take for granted is Google

Have you ever stopped to think about what Google provides to people all over the world for FREE and also what is  one of the most reliable services available to us in the online world – Google products.

Every day people use GMAIL for free and this is used by companies even putting all the trust in a product that is FREE to use. GMAIL is one of the best email platforms available and as a web company that provides email services we fully understand the complications and costs involved to operate an email service to clients.

In 2015 Chameleon Web Services was able to provide 99.2% up-time for email services and this we was proud of and this is with a small number of email accounts compared to Google’s Gmail which services hundreds of millions of users with 99.978% availability and no scheduled downtime.

Google technology supports more than 100 billion Google searches each month for FREE and provides us with information that we use daily to do tasks like fixing things or building something. Google search is used to find anything when we research and shop. The latest Google Voice Search has made searching even more simple and even provides a voice feedback about our searches.

Google also provides more than 100 hours of YouTube video uploads every minute and as a web hosting provider we find this amazing. To handle the storage required to serve the global users is a ridiculous cost and then to maintain this is technically an achievement and have you ever been to YouTube to watch a video and found it is down?

Google’s application and network architecture is one of the best developed systems available, designed for maximum reliability and up-time distributing data across Google’s servers and data centers and the only way Google is able to provide such an amazing service to us all for FREE is with a huge expense in both hardware technology and staff.

If a Google server was to die or even an entire data center fails instantly the data is still be accessible and this is one of the biggest things taken for granted.

Google owns and operates its own data centers around the world to keep the services we use for FREE running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the cost behind each data center is huge.

One of the most amazing things about how reliable Google’s computing platform is the way that the system is designed to assume an ongoing hardware failure and the robust software fail-over can literally handle any disruption.

All Google systems are inherently redundant by design and the platform is completely independent with each subsystem not being dependent on any particular physical or logical server for ongoing operation.

To make this possible the data stored is replicated multiple times across Google’s clustered active servers protected in the case of a machine failure which mean the stored data will still be accessible through another system.

On top of this Google also replicate the data to secondary data centers to provide a further level of protection ensuring that even if a data center was to fail there would be no loss of data and no down time.

Any IT specialist operating in a large company will understand how complex this is and the costs involved to provide these services and yet we do not pay for it.

What does Google provide us for FREE?

• Google Search – Search billions of web pages
  • Including Google Voice Search:-
• Google Chrome – A browser built for speed, simplicity and security and one of the most used browsers today.
• Google Bookmarks – Access your bookmarks and starred items
• GMAIL Fast, searchable email with less spam
• YouTube
• Google MAPS including Mobile – View maps, traffic and directions
• Google Earth – Explore the world from your computer
• Google Drive – Create, share and keep all your stuff in one place
• Google Docs – Open, edit, and create documents
• Google Sheets – Open, edit, and create spreadsheets
• Slides – Open, edit, and create presentations
• Forms – Build free surveys
• Drawings – Create diagrams and flow charts
• Sites – Create websites and secure group wikis
• Calendar – Organize your schedule and share events with friends
• Translate – Instantly translate text, web pages, and files between over 50 languages
• Custom Search – Create a customized search experience for your community
• Scholar – Search scholarly papers
• Trends – Explore past and present search trends
• Google+ Real-life sharing, rethought for the web
• Blogger – Share your life online with a blog – it’s quick, easy and free
• Groups – Create mailing lists and discussion groups
• Hangouts – Conversations that come to life. Anytime, anywhere, for free
• Code – Developer tools, APIs and resources

There are many other things that we use that is using Google in some way or another and Google is also the company behind many of the leading technology advances we use today always driving us forward.

Inside a Google Data Center

From here you can walk into the Data Center and around at Google Lenoir.

The Android area:-