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<img alt="google Android” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/d86c6_4069025342_2d34137574_o.png” title=”google Android” class=”right” width=”150″ height=”150″ />Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.

A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.

But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.

App store fragmentation

Let’s start with a few examples from other mobile platforms.

• On iPhone and other iOS devices, you have the iTunes App Store.
• On Blackberry you have the App World.
• On Nokia phones, you have the Ovi Store.
• On Windows Phone 7 you have the Windows Phone Marketplace.

The point we’re trying to make is, these platforms all focus on one single app store. There is usually never any doubt for users where they should go to find an app.

On Android, you have:

• The official google-supported Android Market.
• A host of third-party app stores. There have even been rumors of an upcoming Android app store from Amazon.
• But here’s the big one: Several carriers have, or are working on, their own branded Android app stores, for example Verizon in the United States and Vodafone in Europe. Since these app stores come from the carriers selling the phones, they will be integrated with the phones from the start.

The third point is really what this article revolves around. It’s not at all unthinkable that some carriers will choose to only include their own app store, replacing the Android Market for millions of Android users.

Fracturing the user experience

You could argue that the multi-app-store approach is one of Android’s strengths, not a weakness but part of its “openness.”

But think about it from the perspective of a regular mobile phone user, a mass-market consumer who may not even know what this thing called “Android” is. Having multiple app stores doesn’t exactly help streamline the Android user experience, does it?

Another problem is that these people could potentially be missing out on vast amounts of apps if they for example only access a carrier-run app store. And they will most likely not even be aware of this.

Even if google wanted to reign in and take back control over the user experience for app purchases, it may be too late for that now. google can improve the Android Market, because that’s under their control, but due to the open nature of the platform, carriers are likely to run wild with their own app stores.

So, assuming this fragmentation is a fact, what does it mean for app developers?

More fragmentation for developers to deal with

Where are developers supposed to place and manage their apps? Android Market is a given, but are they also supposed to place them on all of the other Android app stores or lose out?

And if carrier app stores become even more prevalent – they probably will, carriers love this kind of control and “uniqueness” – will developers have to deal with a ton of different carriers to make sure that their apps are available on their curated app stores?

Here is what Peter Westerbacka of Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, had to say about Android in a recent interview:

Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time. Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again.

Android is on the cusp of an explosion in terms of number of devices sold, but the positive effect on the app economy may be severely hampered by this widespread app store fragmentation.

Or is this all a good thing?

So, what does this all mean for Android? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing?

We obviously lean toward the latter, but it’s worth discussing. What do you think?

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<img alt="Email" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/96cae_5300182266_d4acf9405d_o.jpg” title=”Email” class=”right” width=”150″ height=”99″ />If you follow the tech media, you’ll know that every few months, some journalist or blogger will start speculating about the imminent demise of email. Headlines along the lines of “Email is Dying” or “The Death of Email” show up in RSS feeds all over the place. You know the drill. This has been going on for years and we’re surprised this argument hasn’t (pardon the pun) died out by now.

Here are some of the points that tend to be be raised:

• People today, especially young people, prefer the immediacy of IM and SMS. So email is dying.
• A variation on the above is that email is old technology (it dates back to the early 1970s) based on the concept of traditional postal mail and doesn’t suit our current needs very well. So email is dying.
• The amount of spam is huge. So email is dying.

One of the more recent claims that email will soon be a thing of the past came from none other than Mark Zuckerberg, founder of <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook. Incidentally, he <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebooks-new-messaging-service-promises-death-of-email/articleshow/6935188.cms”>said this while launching <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook’s new messaging system…

Email, however, is most definitely not dying, and here’s why.

Why email will not go away

One could write a major report on this, but we hope that the following arguments meet and remove any doubts you may have as to the continued viability of email as a communication platform.

Email is universal and extremely difficult to replace

Email is the one messaging and notification system that the Internet can’t do without. Think about it. It’s is the fallback we all have access to. It’s been an integral part of the Internet from the start, since well before the arrival of the World Wide Web.

Think <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook is big? Email makes <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook look small. Almost every Internet user out there has an email address, and most Internet services rely on this fact in one form or another, either for account verification and/or customer communication. Not to mention all those inter-personal emails. Then add how reliant many businesses are on email. For anything to completely replace email, it would have to be just as ubiquitous.

Email lets you read and write at your convenience

One of the main complaints is that email just isn’t “immediate” enough. But sometimes that’s a good thing. Just because I want to talk to someone right away doesn’t mean they will be able to drop everything to talk to me, or are available at all. This is a problem that instant messaging via mobile phones won’t solve either, because the receiver will in most cases not have time for your interruption, or even want to talk to you right there and then.

There’s room for multiple channels of communication

People will (or at least should) use the best tool for the job. Guess what, there’s room for both email, IM, <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter. Each has its place and there doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all solution for communication. Sometimes it’s good to keep things separate. Just look at how google Wave tried to merge the IM and email worlds and ended up with a mess.

Spam is a problem, but it’s solvable

Spam filters are pretty darn good these days. Ask how many Gmail users have genuine problems with spam, for example. Not many. It’s also worth noting that ditching email won’t stop spam. Spam follows users and will by its very nature spread to other platforms as they become more common. Just think about the amount of comment spam that blogs are inundated with.

Email is highly flexible

You can send messages of any size (within reason), you can send attachments, both large and small. A nice bonus is also that email delivery is fault tolerant, which makes it flexible in the face of network or server interruptions on the Internet. If your mail server is down for some reason, my mail server will keep trying over and over again to reach it, until it succeeds. This, of course, is necessary for such a huge network as the Internet, where there isn’t a second when something, somewhere, is offline, crashing or malfunctioning.

Email is still evolving

It’s not like email is a completely static platform. Email clients are still innovating without changing the basic premise of how email works. For example, Gmail’s priority inbox doesn’t change email whatsoever, yet adds an additional feature that is useful to many. In other words, email is a platform that still has room for innovation, and better yet, without changing the current standard since it’s all done client-side.

Conclusion

Yes, email is being supplanted for some types of communication. But that’s to be expected. It’s progress. We have more choices for how to communicate these days, and can cherry-pick the best method for the task at hand. This doesn’t mean email is dying. It simply means that the communication ecosystem has expanded.

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If you are anything like me and today is your last workday before the Holidays, two things are probably occupying your mind now:

1. When will Skype be back up and running?
and
2. What to do when when a communication channel of such importance is down?

Well, as far as the first question goes, Skype have already pinpointed the problem – it was caused by many of its “supernodes” going offline at the same time. The company explained that the supernodes act like phone directories for Skype. Of course, this is a really simple explanation, but if you are interested in getting a better understanding, you may want to look at this article.

Today we are seeing some improvement and Skype noted that the service is recovering slowly but surely. A couple of hours ago they tweeted that there is “evidence of a significant increase in the number of people online in the last hour – estimated at over 10M”.
However, the “supernodes” are still causing superproblems for all of us wanting to connect with business partners, friends and loved ones. Let’s just hope that the issue will be resolved before Christmas!

Now, about that second question. As Skype went down and out and the users started complaining all over <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, I got to thinking what to do when one of the services on which we depend on in our daily communication goes offline.

1. Grab the Phone
Remember this good old thing from the past called “phone”? Now, how about putting it to good use and actually calling your friends and family? Of course, if you don’t have time for a full-blown conversation you could also just shoot them a brief message.

2. Send an E-mail
I know that the usage of e-mail is declining and most of the people under 50 find it a bit outdated. I also know that it hardly classifies as “instant messaging”, but it still remains one of the best methods for communication, allowing you to express your thoughts without the limitation of number of symbols.

3. Use Other Messengers
Yes, there are other messengers out there and as one of my friends ironically remarked in a <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook update: “Skype (or rather its lack of service) made me remember my old ICQ password…” So, if you insist on your online presence and communication you may want to revert to your other messengers, or try <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter.

4. Write a Letter
It’s the festive Season, so instead of wishing your business associates and friends “Happy Holidays” and sending them an e-card, why don’t you send them an real card or, better yet, a letter? The feel of paper and a couple of words signed by your own hand add a personal touch to an otherwise overused holiday cheer.

5. Connect Offline
Skype and the other instant messengers are all great for keeping in touch, but nothing replaces meeting the person with whom you do business, exchange jokes or simply want to say “Hello” to. So, when it doubt, just go offline and go meet the people directly. This will be the best way to make a sale, find new friends and boost your relationships.

Now, go and enjoy the Holidays while we keep an eye on your online business for you.

Happy Holidays everyone!

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Happy Holidays everyone!

Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.

Enjoy!

Internet and the Web in general

• The top 20 countries on the Internet, and what the future might bring
• State of the Internet in Europe
• The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000
• The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world
• Is the Web heading toward redirect hell?
• What it takes to be a top 100 website
• Amazing facts and figures about Instant Messaging (infographic)
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/29/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-as-a-single-point-of-failure-for-the-web/”><a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook as a single point of failure for the Web
• 15 fantastic firsts on the Internet
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/05/18/everything-there-is-to-know-about-domain-names-infographic/”>Everything there is to know about domain names (infographic)

Open source

• The consistent failure of Linux to grab even 1% of the desktop OS market
• The 9 most important events in Open Source history
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/03/04/how-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter-and-other-big-sites-give-back-to-open-source/”>How <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter and other big sites give back to Open Source

Web tech

• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook/”>Exploring the software behind <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, the world’s largest site
• jQuery’s triumphant march to success
• The modern browser wars: How well Firefox, IE and Chrome succeed in getting their users to upgrade
• Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener?
• Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

Mobile

• Mobile OS usage splits the world
• Why Android developers are losing money, and it’s not due to piracy

Big business

• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/24/google-facts-and-figures-massive-infographic/”>google facts and figures (massive infographic)
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/04/09/the-money-made-by-microsoft-apple-and-google-1985-until-today/”>The money made by Microsoft, Apple and google, 1985 until today
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/19/how-google-dominates-the-web/”>How google dominates the Web
• Innovation by acquisition
• Our desktops are ruled by dinosaurs
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/08/how-google-collects-data-about-you-and-the-internet/”>How google collects data about you and the Internet

Social media

• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/08/12/the-top-countries-on-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-chart/”>The top countries on <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook
• Study: Ages of social network users
• <a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/05/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook-social-media-juggernaut-infographic/”><a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook, social media juggernaut (infographic)

History

• Amazing facts and figures about the evolution of hard disk drives

We hope you found these posts interesting, fun or maybe even educational. Thank you for reading! <img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/52f9a_icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”wp-smiley” />

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Groupon Performs Worst; Stumbles Under Heavy Site Traffic and Overloaded Servers

San Francisco, CA December 23, 2010 WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, tested 11 leading social shopping and couponing websites for availability and performance during the period November 22 through December 22, 2010. The websites tested included Blippy, Bloomspot, Groupon, Kaboodle, Living Social, Red Laser, Social Currency, Swipely, Tecca, and Woot.

[...]
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Just when we thought that this Holiday Season is going smoothly, Skype proved us wrong. The service is down and many users are feeling the disconnect. BusinessWeek reports that at 12:21 EST the service appeared to be coming back up again, but millions of users are still experiencing difficulties. Skype have already acknowledged the issue in a tweet: “Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations.”

We hope that this issue will not be as major as their 2007 outage and we will be keeping an eye on the developments!

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Do you think your site is immune from vicious or just plain juvenile cyber attacks? Think again. Just look at what’s happened to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing site that has got the whole diplomatic world in an uproar over its posting of more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables from around the world. The memos contain [...]
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In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.

Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them.

Let’s get started! The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 were…

Wikipedia’s failover fail

Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that it can’t go down for a minute without people noticing. According to <a href="http://trends.google.com/websites?q=wikipedia.org”>google Trends for Websites, the site has roughly 50 million visitors per day.

In March, when servers in Wikimedia’s European data center overheated and shut down, the service was supposed to fail over to a US data center. Unfortunately, the failover mechanism didn’t work properly and broke the DNS lookups for all of Wikipedia. This effectively rendered the site unreachable worldwide. It took several hours before everyone could access the site again.

wordpress.com’s big-blog crash

wordpress.com got a pretty bad start this year when <a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/wp-com-downtime-summary/”>a network issue caused the biggest outage the service had seen in four years. The outage became extra noticeable not just because of the sheer number of blogs it hosts (at the time 10 million, now many more), but also because so many high-profile blogs use it. The wordpress.com outage took down blogs such as TechCrunch, GigaOM and the Wired blogs for almost two hours in February.

Gmail’s multiple outages

Gmail is one of the world’s most popular email services, and is an integral part of google Apps. Unfortunately, it’s had several notable outages this year. These issues haven’t always affected Gmail’s entire user base, but enough of it to make headlines in the news.

In February, a routine maintenance caused a disruption that cascaded from data center to data center, knocking out Gmail worldwide for about 2.5 hours. In March, Gmail had an issue that lasted as much as 36 hours for some users. Another incident happened early in September, when overloaded routers made the service completely unavailable for almost two hours.

China reroutes the Internet

In April, China Telecom spread incorrect traffic routes to the rest of the Internet. In this specific case it meant that during 18 minutes, potentially as much as 15% of the traffic on the Internet was sent via China because routers believed it was the most effective route to take.

Similar incidents have happened before, for example when <a href="http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Feb/24/youtube_offline_pakistan_telecom_blamed.html”>youtube was hijacked globally by a small Pakistani ISP two years ago. Normally this results in a crash since the ISP can’t handle the traffic. However, China Telecom was able to handle the traffic, so most people never noticed this. At most they noticed increased latency as traffic to the affected networks took a very long and awkward route across the Internet (via China).

Even though no serious outage happened as a result of this, we think it’s such a fascinating disruption of the traffic flow that we felt it was worth including here. This is an inherent weakness of today’s Internet infrastructure, which largely relies on the honor system. Renesys has a more in-depth explanation of this incident and how it could happen. We should state that it wasn’t necessarily an intentional hijacking.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter’s World Cup woes

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter seemed like the ideal companion to the World Cup (soccer to you Americans, football to the rest of the world, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sD_8prYOxo”>John Cleese explains it best). Tweeting about the World Cup proved so popular that it slowed down or broke <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter several times during the weeks of the event. The upside is that this effectively load tested <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter’s infrastructure, revealing potential weaknesses. As a result, <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter’s service today is most likely more stable than it might otherwise have been.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook’s feedback loop

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook has become a true juggernaut with more than 500 million users. That hasn’t changed its development philosophy, “don’t be afraid to break things.” This aggressive approach to speedy development has been key to <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook’s success, but, well, sometimes it will break things.

<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook’s <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-24/tech/<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook.outage_1_outage-half-billion-users-social-networking?_s=PM:TECH”>worst outage in four years came in September when a seemingly innocent update to <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook’s backend code caused <a href="http://www.<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919″>a feedback loop that completely overloaded its databases. The only way for <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook to recover was to take down the entire site and remove the bad code before taking the site back online. <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook was offline for approximately 2.5 hours.

Foursquare’s double whammy

Foursquare’s location-based social network has been a resounding success and has in little time gathered a following of millions, so when the service went down for roughly 11 hours early in October, people of course noticed. The culprit was an overloaded database. And as if to add insult to injury, almost exactly the same thing happened the day after, taking the site down for an additional six hours.

Paypal’s payment problems

When Paypal stumbles, so do the many thousands of merchants that rely on Paypal to handle payments, not to mention the millions of regular consumers who use Paypal for their online payments. You can imagine the effect, and sales lost, if Paypal stops working for hours on end. Which was exactly what happened in October when a problem with Paypal’s network equipment crippled the service for as much as 4.5 hours. At its peak the issue affected all of Paypal’s members worldwide for 1.5 hours.

Tumblr’s tumble

Tumblr was (and still is) one of the great social media successes of 2010, but with rapid growth comes scalability challenges. This has become increasingly noticeable, and culminated with a 24-hour outage early in December when all of Tumblr’s 11 million blogs were offline due to a broken database cluster.

The Wikileaks drama

If you’ve missed this you must have been hiding under a rock, which in turn was buried below a mountain of rocks. The site issues that Wikileaks experienced during the so-called Cablegate were significant. First the site was the victim of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack which forced Wikileaks to switch to a different web host. After Wikileaks moved to Amazon EC2 to better handle the increased traffic, Amazon soon shut them down. In addition to this, several countries blocked access to the Wikileaks site. And then the possibly largest blow came when the DNS provider for the official Wikileaks.org domain, EveryDNS, shut down the domain itself.

Without a working domain name in place, Wikileaks could for a time only be reached by its IP address. Since then, Wikileaks has spread itself out, mirroring the content over hundreds of sites and different domain names, including a new main site at Wikileaks.ch.

As if this wasn’t enough drama, you have to add the reactions from some of Wikileaks’ supporters (not from Wikileaks itself). The services that cut off Wikileaks in various ways (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, EveryDNS, etc.) were subjected to distributed denial-of-service attacks from upset supporters across the world, which resulted in even more downtime. There was also collateral damage, when some attackers mistook the DNS provider EasyDNS for EveryDNS, aiming their attacks at the wrong target.

The Wikileaks drama is without a doubt the Internet incident of the year.

Final words

The events we have listed here above really are just a small sample of everything that has happened in 2010. Even without Wikileaks, it’s been a very eventful year on the Internet. That said, this is something we find ourselves saying every year. The truth is that the Internet is not quite as stable and solid as most of us would like to believe. It’s a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break from time to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.

Hopefully 2011 will be a less eventful year, but we wouldn’t count on it.

If you feel we missed something major, please let us know in the comments!

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<img alt="Blogging services" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/ec827_5269417400_e17fc8debc_o.png” title=”Blogging services” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”105″ />

Blogging services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for wordpress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr and Posterous. There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, many of them residing on these services.

One big bonus of using a blogging service is that they take much of the pain away from having a blog since they handle the hosting for its users and everything is already set up. Once you publish, the responsibility for keeping that content available online rests firmly on the shoulders of the blogging service.

With that in mind, we decided to test five of today’s most popular blogging services to see how reliable they actually are.

Which services we tested, and how

We included Blogger, <a href="http://wordpress.com/”>wordpress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous in this survey. There are of course other services out there as well, but we chose to focus on these since it’s quite likely that if you’re currently on a blogging service, you’re on one of these five.

For each blogging service, we monitored the uptime of the homepage and four individual blogs, so we could see how the service as a whole performed. For the details, check out our “Methodology” section at the bottom of this post.

The tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, October 15 – December 15. We used the Pingdom site monitoring service (of course), performing tests from multiple locations in North America and Europe.

Key findings

• The reliability winner(s). The winner was without a doubt google’s Blogger. The Blogger blogs didn’t have any downtime whatsoever during the two months we monitored them, followed by wordpress.com which had very little downtime. Typepad deserves an honorable mention here as well. Posterous had somewhat mixed results, but overall receives a passing grade. Tumblr was the only service in the test that truly failed.
• Tumblr’s troubles. Tumblr has had a rough time with their stability lately, which is made abundantly clear by this survey. Most of the monitored blogs had very little downtime, but the Tumblr blogs all had a huge amount of downtime for such a short period of time. Some Tumblr blogs were down for a total of more than two days during the two-month period of this survey. Tumblr also had the single longest outage by far, where its blogs were unavailable for almost 24 hours on December 5-6.
• Not all blogs are created equal, even within the same blogging service. Downtime can vary significantly between blogs on the same service, presumably depending on which servers the blogs are hosted on. It’s a similar situation to that of shared hosting, where you can end up on servers that perform worse than others for various reasons.

Blogging service downtime

The bars in the chart below represent the average downtime per blog over these two months, based on the four blogs we tested for each service.

<img alt="Blogging service downtime" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/2ac2d_5268805887_efae004bf3_o.png” title=”Blogging service downtime” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”250″ />

To dive deeper, please check out the individual sections below where we expand on the numbers for each blogging service.

Tumblr overview

• Tumblr homepage uptime: 97.72%
• Average Tumblr blog uptime: 96.81%

We’ll be writing a bit more about Tumblr than about the other services for the simple reason that more of note happened. The rather extreme results are worth a closer look.

<img alt="Tumblr downtime" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/2ac2d_5269417358_7acf7f3cca_o.png” title=”Tumblr downtime” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”220″ />

The single longest outage was identical on all four blogs, a full 23 hours and 44 minutes of downtime that started late on the 5th of December. The Tumblr homepage was also affected, but was “only” down for 22 hours and 16 minutes. This huge outage was according to Tumblr caused by a database cluster failing during maintenance.

However, it should be noted that Tumblr’s problems haven’t just been a few big outages, but a large number of smaller ones. The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with the service.

We feel for Tumblr, because it’s quite likely that they’ve had issues scaling the service in face of its growing popularity. Tumblr currently has more than 11 million blogs, and they’ve stated that traffic to the service is increasing with more than 500 million page views each month.

This rapid growth is bound to be a factor in the downtime we’ve seen. The important thing now is how Tumblr will handle this going forward. They are no doubt working hard on increasing the capacity of their infrastructure.

Posterous overview

• Posterous homepage uptime: 99.95%
• Average Posterous blog uptime: 99.86%

The results for Posterous were a bit mixed, as you’ll see below, and we’ll explain what we could see.

<img alt="Posterous downtime" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/f86ea_5268806081_c0b5f8160a_o.png” title=”Posterous downtime” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”220″ />

No single outage exceeded 20 minutes.

We noticed something with Posterous that we didn’t see with any of the other blogging services, and that is that for some reason the external, custom domain names that pointed to Posterous blogs were slower and occasionally timed out, which effectively resulted in more downtime. (Blogs 3 and 4 on each service use custom domain names instead of subdomains, i.e. www.example.com instead of example.posterous.com. See why under “Methodology at the bottom of this post.).

First we thought that maybe these custom domain names had DNS issues, in which case we would have removed any bad results caused by that since it wouldn’t have been fair to Posterous. However, the DNS resolution itself wasn’t slow, and what seemed to be causing the slowness was as far as we could see a series of redirects after getting to Posterous. It could be a coincidence, but Posterous might want to look into this just in case. (Posterous is welcome to contact us for more information, we’d help as much as we can.)

wordpress.com overview

• wordpress.com homepage uptime: 99.98%
• Average wordpress.com blog uptime: 99.99%

Since nothing of note happened (which is a good thing!) we haven’t included much analysis on this one.

<img alt="wordpress.com downtime” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/401f6_5269417290_8e90a3f7bc_o.png” title=”wordpress.com downtime” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”220″ />

No single outage exceeded 4 minutes.

Typepad overview

• Typepad homepage uptime: 99.99%
• Average Typepad blog uptime: 99.98%

Same thing here as with wordpress.com, things were stable and calm, which is good for Typepad.

<img alt="Typepad downtime" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/35e0b_5268805967_61ed7bdf5a_o.png” title=”Typepad downtime” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”220″ />

No single outage exceeded 6 minutes.

Blogger overview

• Blogger homepage uptime: 100.00%
• Average Blogger blog uptime: 100.00%

Since Blogger was the only service with zero downtime overall, we skipped the chart here. We hope you don’t mind. It simply wouldn’t have been very interesting.

Conclusion and final words

In terms of keeping blogs up and available, the winners’ stand looks like this:

1. Blogger
2. wordpress.com
3. Typepad
4. Posterous
5. Tumblr

The race was very close between the top three, but we should congratulate google for the flawless uptime of Blogger during the survey.

As for Tumblr, we think that they are very aware of their current site issues, and it’s quite possible that if we make a similar survey a few months from now things might fall out very differently. Regardless, we wish them the best of luck with this.

And finally, you might wonder what kind of uptime numbers we consider acceptable for a blogging service. We think that 99.9% uptime is an acceptable goal. It’s doable from the service provider’s point of view, and the user gets a blog that will not be down more than 43 minutes per month on average. It’s the nature of the game that uptime will vary over time, so some months will be better (or worse) than others.

Overall, with the obvious exception of Tumblr’s current predicament, these blogging services are all quite reliable. There’s of course more to choosing a blogging service than mere availability, but it’s one factor, and now you have some actual numbers so you don’t have to guess.

monitoring was done from Pingdom’s 20+ monitoring locations spread over North America and Europe, with tests performed every minute. To avoid the risk of false positives due to local network issues, our monitoring system always performs an extra test from a second location before downtime is counted. The monitoring was done during October 15 – December 15, 2010.

<img src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/35e0b_ItqEPVthJsI” height=”1″ width=”1″ />
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