One of the main considerations when deciding to start a blog and debating between the different blog platform services is reliability. When i say reliability i mean the least as possible downtime errors of the blog’s server that provided by the blog platform service. When a blog is suffering from a lot of “crashes” it distance visitors and downgrade its search rankings, which can be pretty destructive.
Testing Blog Platform Services Downtime
To assist with the decision making, i have found a great study from the last few weeks by the monitoring site, Pingdom, that examined the downtime errors throughout the year of the top blogging platform service in 2011- WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad and Posterous. Pingdom has monitored the blogs on a minute-by-minute basis and whenever encountered with a downtime error, it examined a second check to verify it indeed had a downtime error.
Because the blog platform services offers the possibility to host the blog on a subdomain of the service (blogname.blogservice.com) or on a custom domain (blogname.com), for each blogging service 4 different blogs were tested- 2 for subdomain blogs and 2 for custom domain blog. Errors that were outside of the blog platform services control (such as DNS errors) were excluded.
The Results
The test results were pretty conclusive- Blogger is the most reliable blog platform service in terms of downtime errors. It had only 0.3 hours of downtime errors throughout the year where the second most reliable blog service WordPress had more than 5 times as much downtime errors (1.6 hours) throughout 2011. Not so far behind on the third place we can find TypePad with 1.9 hours of yearly downtime errors.
The last two places have been characterized with huge gaps between the others- Posterous had a 12.1 hours of downtime errors in 2011 and Tumblr had an enormous amount of 42.1 hours of downtime errors, more than 140 times as much as Blogger! While Tumblr can at least comfort with the fact that it is down from 47.5 hours downtime errors it had in 2010, Posterous has gone way up above the 2.1 hours downtime errors it had that year.
- Blogger – 18 Minutes Downtime
- WordPress – 96 Minutes Downtime
- TypePad – 114 Minutes Downtime
- Posterous – 726 Minutes Downtime
- Tumblr – 2526 Minutes Downtime
