Tumblr Ranked 'Least Reliable' Blogging Platform: Study

When you're trying to get your hard-earned feelings out on the internet for everyone to see, the last thing you need is for your Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, or Posterous account to be down, forcing you to wait until next week's therapy session to get all this emotion off your chest.

Thankfully, Pingdom, an uptime monitoring service, recently released the results of a study that tells us once and for all which popular blogging platforms are the most and least reliable places to blog.

The results were based on data collected over 11 months in 2011. Pingdom used their own monitoring service to test the homepage and four individual blogs on each platform once every minute. This monitoring was done from over 30 locations across North America and Europe.

The results varied widely by platform, though Tumblr was far and away the worst of the bunch. The site averaged almost four hours of downtime per month and notched a total of 42.1 hours of overall downtime between January 1 and November 30. (Pingdom defines "downtime" as taking longer than 30-seconds to load, displaying an error message or failing to come up at all.)

Tumblr's problems may be linked to its booming popularity. Indeed, of the services surveyed by Royal Pingdom, Tumblr is the fastest growing.

Believe it or not, these numbers mark a big improvement for the trendy blogging site. When Pingdom conducted this same survey last year, Tumblr had more downtime in two months, than in almost the entirety of 2011. In December of last year the site was down for a full 24 hours.

Pingdom's award for most reliable platform goes to Google's near perfect Blogger, which was down an average of less than two minutes per month in 2011. For the second year in a row, Pingdom was able to report that Blogger had 100 percent uptime for both the homepage and individual blogs studied.

However, Blogger experienced a massive outage in May 2011, which lasted for nearly 24 hours. Pingdom's study doesn't seem to account for this at all.

Check out how Wordpress, Typepad and Posterous stack up to Blogger and Tumblr in the slideshow below.

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Comments

[JavaSavant]

11:23 AM on 12/21/2011

Since they failed to notice a 24 hour Blogger outage, I'd say this report has zero credibility.

[BLKinNV]

11:47 AM on 12/20/2011

If we were talking factually wrong I'd have guessed it was Redstate

[AnaM]

11:28 PM on 12/19/2011

Is there some Google bias here?
I don't see how Blogger is superior, especially in terms of audience/exposure.

[Erdgeist]

09:35 AM on 12/20/2011

Typepad is the best in terms of being "granny abled' for those of us who want a blog as simple as a toaster. I have been blogging for 5 years (5 days a week). My Typepad has never been down. Oh sure it has had minor problems - but down? No way.

[KenGirard]

02:25 PM on 12/20/2011

This has nothing to do with audience, or exposure. It has to do with downtime. Nothing else.

Pingdom defines "downtime" as taking longer than 30-seconds to load, displaying an error message or failing to come up at all.

Audience & exposure have nada to do with this.

[nohopefortheleft]

10:56 PM on 12/19/2011

What!

[Luke Larsson]

10:48 PM on 12/19/2011

They forgot about Squarespace. It's almost never down.

[VicYoungblood]

05:55 PM on 12/19/2011

So, let's ignore the fact that those hours (out of a whole MONTH, mind you) are usually at 5-ish A.M. timeslots when most people are sleeping. And let's also ignore the fact that it's more versatile than any blog I've used.

And because, y'know, not being able to blog for THREE HOURS out of THIRTY DAYS is absolutely criminal. *sarcasm*

[nishioka]

12:12 AM on 12/20/2011

That's the problem with the internet. If something's down, it's the biggest catastrophe ever. Try reading World of Warcraft forums while the servers are down for maintenance one morning. If I didn't know any better I'd think some of those people were one harsh reply away from simultaneously cutting themselves and jumping off of a bridge.

[wonderYrednow]

12:43 AM on 12/20/2011

How do they hold the knife while they are jumping ?

[KenGirard]

02:29 PM on 12/20/2011

5am-ish time slot...where? If it is 5am in CA, it is 8am in NY, and when it is 5am in NY, it is 2am in CA. And then of course there are all those loyal users located in England, Russia, Japan...
It is always 5pm-ish some where, so have a drink.

[RecreationalPilot]

05:28 PM on 12/19/2011

Blogger pages are sophmoric in nature, for simple sites.

Compare that to the richness of a self-hosted WP site and there is no comparison.