
Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.
Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. Not only the uptime of the blogging platform’s homepage was monitored, but also four individual blogs.
Pingdom found that Blogger didn’t seem to display any downtime whatsoever in the two months of testing, while WordPress.com also showed an ability to remain available most of the time. Typepad came up third, but not with a lot of difference from the two former blogging service.
When you look at the upstart, basic blogging services, the differences become more clear. Posterous showed mixed results in terms of reliability, but Tumblr clearly takes the downtime cake on that level.
According to Pingdom, some of the Tumblr blogs it monitored during the two-month window were unavailable for more than two days, beating the general downtime of the platform of 24+ hours Tumblr struggled with last week.
Clearly, the startup can use the recent capital injection to improve reliability quite a bit:
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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.
