As the world moves forward toward heavier reliance on cloud computing — a fate that seems inevitable, especially if technologies like tablet computers and Google’s Cr-48 are any indication — many concerns have been raised. While privacy issues are the biggest complaint, some have been vocal about the possibility for losing data due to server failures or downtime. However, if Google’s Blogger is any indication of web service reliability, this may not be as big an issue as you think.
A study from Royal Pingdom took a look at the various blogging services. This was no anecdotal examination, either. Pingdom monitored multiple blogs per service provider over the course of two months, and intentionally looked at blogs with diverse subjects and domain names.
Blogger came out as the clear winner. It’s downtime? 0.00% (and, if you’d like, you can add as many 0s to the end of that as you want). That’s the downtime not just for the home page but for each of the four blogs being tracked as well. While each other service examined had a visual display chart, Pingdom didn’t even bother creating one for blogger, stating “It simply wouldn’t have been interesting.”
However, all but one of the other blog services examined (WordPress, TypePad, Posterous, Tumblr) made a good showing, with over 99.9% uptime. Sadly, Tumblr fell well below the standard, with about 97% — indicative of the recent stability problems that the site has been working hard to resolve.
Does this show us a picture of how stable content storage can be in the cloud? Google’s servers, considering their vast resources and experience, may not grant a picture of what standard servers look like today. Nonetheless, they do show us that perfect uptime is possible — and will become more likely as technology marches forward.
