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Thinking about uptime numbers for the top 20 websites

By Jason Hoffman 3 April 07

I was reading Om early today and saw Blogger, YouTube get F for downtime. Om was discussing Pingdom’s post Downtime in 2007 for the Alexa top 20 websites

And I found myself wondering how many of those sites are destination sites versus serving their customers’ pages under some-subdomain.some-other-domain.com

For example,

Does 4 hours and 47 minutes of downtime for blogger.com over-estimate or under-estimate the availability of myblog.blogspot.com?

Do I really care about the uptime for Microsoft’s main corporate site at microsoft.com when I’m using Microsoft Live or hotmail?

Does the uptime for comcast.net (which is a destination site) tell me anything about what I really care about: how often my comcast cable modem hangs?

Does the uptime for photobucket.com tell whether they’re better or worse at serving my images and video at i128.photobucket.com/my-account/?

It’s great to see craigslist.org do as well as most of the list because everyone seems to tell me that it their setup is modest and doesn’t require a large staff (there’s no 100 MWatt datacenters in their future).


  1. I remember the last time Flickr went to Hellen Beck, and how the site was pretty much offline, but the images still served as expected. You could say that Flickr was down, but the most important service still worked.

    I would, however, fear the backlash from the bloggers and the teens if those services went down for a whole day or something. They might have to, you know, go outside, or talk to friends, or something else drastic like that.

    — MacStansbury    506 days ago    #

  2. Very good point, Jason.

    We (at FeedBurner) optimize everything to keep feeds available no matter what. The web interface at www.feedburner.com is important too, but there’d be a lot of angry publishers (and subscribers!) if feeds.feedburner.com was down!

    — John Zeratsky    505 days ago    #

  3. Well you have to compare apples with apples. Users tend to compare downtime to things that are important to them. If you are a TypePad user and www.typepad.com went down that would affect you but you don’t care if www.sixapart.com goes down.

    And I’m glad that we’re not hosted on the Temple Grid Server.

    Stats have different meanings to different people based on what was collected. The trick is collect the data you require to make the correct analysis.

    — Jacques Marneweck    501 days ago    #

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