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The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services of 2011

December 15th, 2011 General

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There are millions upon millions of blogs available today, and many of them are hosted on dedicated blogging services. These kinds of services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for WordPress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr.

One of the main benefits of using a blogging service is that they make blogging simple. There’s no need to deal with traditional hosting. You blog, the blogging service keeps your content available online.

In theory, blogging services should also be able to make your blog more reliable since they have a lot of servers at their disposal, often spread across multiple data centers. If your blog gets flooded by traffic (usually a excellent thing), a blogging service has a much better chance handling it since your traffic is just a drop in the ocean for them. Had you been on a single server (or even a shared one), your site might not have coped.

With that in mind, we chose to test five of today’s most well loved blogging services to see how reliable they really are. You may remember that we did this last year as well, so we’ll be able to see how and if anything has changed since then.

Which services we tested, and how

We included Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous in this assessment. There are additional blogging services out there as well, but we focused on these since it’s quite likely that if you’re blogging today, you’re on one of these five.

For each blogging service, we monitored the availability 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 11 months, January 1 – November 30, 2011. We used the Pingdom site monitoring service (of course, it’s what we do), performing tests from multiple locations in North America and Europe.

Key findings

The most reliable service is… Without a doubt, Blogger. The service had nearly no downtime to speak of, just a few minutes over the entire year. Google’s blogging service has been consistently reliable and really placed top in our assessment last year as well. WordPress.com and Typepad deserve honorable mentions, with less than two hours of downtime across the entire year, which is also very excellent.
Tumblr still has some reliability issues. On the upside, it does seem like the service has improved its availability since last year, and hasn’t suffered from the same kinds of dreadfully long outages as it did in 2010.
Blog uptime varies even within the same service. As we observed last year, the amount of downtime can differ significantly between blogs on the same service. This is universally right across all of the services we monitored, although the differences were more dramatic in some cases.

Of course, when we say “the entire year” in this post, we really mean the initially 11 months since that is the data we used for this assessment.

Blogging service downtime

The main point of this assessment was to find out which blogging services are the most reliable, i.e. have the least downtime. When you run a blog, you naturally don’t want your visitors to be met by an error page, or not able to load the page at all.

Since this assessment covers such a long time span, 11 months, we believe it should give a very honest overview of the amount of downtime each service had. And to be extra sure these numbers would be representative, we monitored several blogs per service. What you see in the chart here not more than is the average blog downtime per service.

Blogging service downtime

As you can see in the chart, the average Tumblr blog suffers from significantly more downtime than blogs on any of the additional services included in this assessment.

On the additional end of the spectrum you have Blogger, WordPress.com and Typepad, which were the most reliable services by far. They all had less than two hours of downtime over the 11 months of this assessment.

If you run that down to average blog downtime per month you get:

Tumblr: 3 hours and 50 minutes per month
Posterous: 1 hour and 6 minutes per month
Typepad: 10 minutes per month
WordPress.com: 9 minutes per month
Blogger: 1.5 minutes per month

Blogger really had so small downtime that it managed an uptime of 99.998%. Since we rounded everything to two decimals in this assessment, you see 100.00% uptime for the service. To nearly reach “five nines” over such a long period of time is highly impressive.

Now on to taking a more detailed look at the individual blogging services.

Tumblr overview

Tumblr homepage uptime: 99.62%
Average Tumblr blog uptime: 99.48%

Tumblr downtime

The single longest outage for a Tumblr blog we detected was 3 hours, but three of the four blogs we monitored had no outage lasting longer than 1 hour and 37 minutes.

Although Tumblr placed last in this assessment, it should be noted that the service has undergone a significant improvement in terms of reliability since our assessment from last year. To give you an example, Tumblr had more downtime in two months in 2010 than it’s had the entire year in 2011 (well, the initially 11 months).

Tumblr has also managed to avoid any major incidents like the ones they had last year, usually resolving any downtime issues relatively quickly. Last December, Tumblr was at one point offline nearly 24 hours straight. Nothing even close to that has happened in 2011.

One mitigating circumstance is that Tumblr is probably the fastest on the rise of these services, which does tend to come with its own set of scalability problems. To give you an thought: A year ago the service had 11 million blogs. Today it has more than 37 million blogs.

Posterous overview

Posterous homepage uptime: 99.82%
Average Posterous blog uptime: 99.85%

Posterous downtime

As you can see in the chart, the result for Posterous was a mixed bag.

The standouts in terms if downtime were blogs using custom domains (blog 3 and 4, see “Methodology” at the bottom of this article). We noticed this difference for Posterous last year as well. This downtime doesn’t appear be directly DNS-related, which could otherwise have clarified it to some extent. (Involving your own field name introduces another link in the chain that can break, which could potentially result in more downtime.)

This was also reflected in the length of individual downtimes we detected. One custom field blog was unavailable for nearly eight hours at one point, while the additional custom field blog was at one point unavailable more than four hours. The blogs not using custom domains had much shorter outages, none lasting more than 10 minutes.

It could still be a coincidence, and maybe the specific blogs we monitored would show these differences regardless, but it’s noteworthy nonetheless.

(If you work at Posterous and would like more in rank from us, please feel free to contact us and we’ll help as much as we can.)

Typepad overview

Typepad homepage uptime: 99.97%
Average Typepad blog uptime: 99.98%

Typepad downtime

The longest single outage we detected for Typepad was 36 minutes.

There really isn’t all that much we can say in this area Typepad’s results, additional than that they were very respectable. Having only a couple of hours of downtime over the course of 11 months is a job well done.

WordPress.com overview

WordPress.com homepage uptime: 99.99%
Average WordPress.com blog uptime: 99.98%

Wordpress.com downtime

No single outage for a WordPress.com blog exceeded 47 minutes.

There isn’t much to say in this area this either. The results for Automattic’s hosted WordPress service are very solid, with very small downtime over the 11-month period of this assessment. Again, job well done.

Blogger overview

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

The downtime for Blogger’s blogs ranged between 10-15 minutes for the entire 11-month period of the assessment, barely more than a minute per month on average.

Due to this, we chose to skip the chart for Blogger because it simply wouldn’t have been very fascinating (this year again, last year’s shorter, two-month assessment came up with zero downtime). As we pointed out earlier in this article, there was so small downtime that when rounded to two decimals, like we’ve done here, it ends up as 100.00% (instead of 99.998%, if we’d used three decimals). Google is doing a fantastic job.

Conclusion

Of course reliability is but one of several factors you want to take into significance when picking a blogging service. There’s everything from personal preference, your general blogging desires, the community, the interface, and much more to take into significance.

That said, when it comes to sheer blog hosting reliability, the results are as follows:

Blogger
WordPress.com
Typepad
Posterous
Tumblr

The reliability ranking here turned out to be something of a repeat from last year’s assessment. Blogger is still the reliability champion, followed by WordPress.com and Typepad, in that order.

We should mention that having no downtime whatsoever is not realistic in the long run. Although no one likes it, downtime is simply a fact of life on the Internet. The trick is keeping it to a smallest, which is often simpler said than done.

For a blogging service, we reckon the aim should be to deliver at least 99.9% uptime in the long term, which allows for 43 minutes of downtime per month on average.

This is why Google’s close to exact score for Blogger over such a long period of time is so impressive. We have no doubt that at some point Blogger will suffer from some kind of notable outage, but Google has done an admirable job so far so it may take quite some time until that happens. And when it does happen, Google does have a excellent footstep record for resolving such issues considering the size of its infrastructure and the amount of services they offer. All we can do is congratulate Google on their brilliant work keeping Blogger available to this degree.

Although Tumblr finished up in last house in this assessment, it does seem to be on the right footstep. It may take the service a while to truly catch up with its on the rise popularity, though. Tumblr is, as the saying goes, a victim of its own success at the moment.

Methodology:

We monitored five websites for each blogging service: the homepage, and four individual blogs. The homepage was not included in any average.

Since public can place their blogs on either a subdomain to the service, or use their own field name, we picked two representatives of each for each service. In the charts above, blog 1 and 2 for each service are on subdomains (e.g. example.tumblr.com), while 3 and 4 are on custom domains (e.g. www.example.com). Since potential DNS issues with the custom domains would be outside the control of the blogging services, we did our best to exclude any downtime caused by this.

This is what we count as “down”: If the blog loads so slowly we can’t load the HTML page within 30 seconds. If the server responds with an HTTP error code (5xx or 4xx). Or, of course, if the site is completely unreachable.

Monitoring was done from Pingdom’s 30+ monitoring locations spread over North America and Europe, with tests performed every minute. To avoid the risk of fake positives due to local arrangement issues, our monitoring system always performs an extra test from a second location before downtime is counted. The monitoring was done during January 1 – November 30, 2011.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the initially to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services of 2011