14 DAY TRIAL // With Tumblr's rather spectacular meltdown from a couple of weeks ago, a test of the reliability of blog hosting platforms seems spot on. Pingdom did just such a test and the results, though not exactly surprising are interesting. The most reliable blogging platform is also the oldest, Blogger, while the least reliable is, surprise, surprise, Tumblr.
"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," Pingdom wrote.
"With that in mind, we decided to test five of today’s most popular blogging services to see how reliable they actually are," it said. "We included Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous in this survey."
The researchers set up four blogs on each of the platforms and then monitored their availability as well as that of the homepage. The test was carried out over a period of two months, starting October 15, and the availability of each site was tested once every minute.
Tumblr fared the worst. The increasingly popular blogging platform has been feeling the growing pains and has struggled to stay up in the past couple of months.
In total, Tumblr had 47.5 hours of downtime in that period. The longest was an almost 24-hour outage from a couple of weeks ago.
Posterous fared much better with an average of 128 minutes of downtime in the time frame tested. No single outage exceeded 20 minutes and the blogs had an uptime of 99.86 percent.
WordPress.com did significantly better. It had an average uptime of 99.99 percent, it was down just 9 minutes with no single outage longer than 4 minutes.
Typepad had a blog uptime of 99.98 percent and was down 14 minutes. Finally, Blogger had no downtime whatsoever making it the undisputed winner of the test.
