Pingdom just published a report measuring total 2007 downtime to date for the top 20 sites on the web as ranked by Alexa. Leading the list is Yahoo with zero downtime. Google’s YouTube and Blogger.com are the worst performers, with over 4 hours of downtime each (although Google.com is very reliable).
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Michael Arrington
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April 2, 2007
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Is Yahoo! still the world’s most visited site? Haven’t checked Yahoo! site for so long. If so, then they’re doing a really good job.
Comscore says MySpace is bigger, but this is Alexa, which is, well, Alexa.
I don’t doubt the Blogger numbers at all. In fact, I’m somewhat surprised it’s not higher. I was still using Blogger about a year and a half ago and I remember the numerous frustrating times when the service would be down. I’m curious if those reported numbers are for when the site is totally un-contactable or if it measures total unusable time, because there were plenty of times when you’d just get an error page, along the lines of, ‘we’re down right now, but our engineers are working on it’.
The problem with the number… i mean besides them coming from Alexa, is the fact that websites have down time that does not shut down the root directory, but still doesn’t allow access to accounts and such. Take Myspace for example. Myspace is down at least once a week for some sort of maintenance. You can go to myspace.com and even view most profiles but you can’t log in to check yours or change anything.
To further Sam’s point - my first thought was Yahoo’s 0m number obviously doesn’t include all of the times I can’t access my Yahoo email account.
Well, according to Alexa, Yahoo is the most visited site on the Internet. Most say Alexa is useless, but for the big sites like these, who knows…but with so many users and a sampling as huge, I doubt Alexa is wrong with this one. With YouTube site and its video content, I doubt its a big surprise it has one of the biggest downtimes. I still think it should have zero downtime, especially now that Google is in charge.
That sure as hell doesn’t account for the 5-10% of the time I get a generic 500ish error on Myspace. Congratulations, Myspace, your servers had an hour of downtime last year, but your web app had more than an hour of inaccessibility _yesterday_.
I could see googles other companies becoming more reliable as their revamps continue to move forward.
It would be interesting to correlate this information with the technologies the sites are using.
I’m guessing the ubiquitous “MySpace is experiencing technical difficulties” errors don’t count as downtime since a page is displayed to the browser, but anyone who uses MySpace regularly knows it’s unusable a lot of the time.
If I remember correctly, Amazon.com was down for about 2 hours in the summer. But since Alexa is Amazon’s I understand the lie.
Tony, that comment doesn’t make any sense. The downtime isn’t being monitored by Amazon or Alexa. Pingdom is, a different company. And it’s 2007 data, which wouldn’t include last summer.
Amazon was down for hours back in august. Shame Pingdom.
http://www.baselinemag.com/art.....688,00.asp
You’re right Mike. Sorry about that.
Is there a service that is able to determine accessibility vs. down time. Ie receiving an error page? That would be pretty interesting. Yahoo, MySpace, etc, they all seem to generate quite a few error pages.
Probably Bloglines beats them all
I agree with Brad. “This site is down” is probably still “pingable”. Not a very good measure!
- Would like to differentiate between transactional site like amazon.com & ebay.com wrt others (google,yahoo etc). Keeping a transactional site functional is order of magnitude difficult than running a read only website..
Kudos to amazon, & ebay - they rock..
I doubt they just ping, but who knows. Ping alone would not be the whole picture for sure.
Totally unsurprised by Blogger, surprised by YouTube and that MySpace isn’t worse.
it would be nice if this service could differentiate the reasons for the failure ie DNS issues, content server being down, 404 error messages, etc
fine. as i think - yahoo the best.
how about gmail? it has the worst availability among the top three free email providers such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo…it goes down for hours on end
recco, which is why you host your blog on blogger? Nice one.
jamie, i dont know what youre talking about, but I havent had any issues with gmail. I know they have been having well publicized issues of late, but my understanding is that many changes are being made to accommodate their new offerings
Need more info on the methodology. I use yahoo for world, national and business (technology) news. Been seeing more frequency lately with feed errors (no content available).
If you know more about their methodology, please post.
Paul
I say instead of bashing a list - for technicalities ;
- Lets be happy somone is producing numbers; and I agree with the idea that - it would be great to see the technology with each company -
- Although I would speculate; most of its proprietary
Information on how GIGRIB works is available here:
http://uptime.pingdom.com/general/methodology
Another thing to consider is what Flickr does while upgrading (which is rare and quick). They put up a page simply saying they are working on upgrading/fixing; would that return as down or up? I would presume up and if so can inflate their numbers…just a thought.
Why isn’t Google at the top of this list (not for downtime, for top sites)
Simon - both MySpace and Yahoo have more page views than Google.
It seems that there is a correlation between how new the website (or its popularity in the web community) and how much downtime it has, which makes sense.
Good Job Yahoo!
4 hours of downtime for Blogger… I thought it should be higher. I can still remember how frustrating it was when I was with Blogger last time…. now, I have my own domain.
Are the stats correct?
I am quite sure Myspace was down for more than an hour cuz at one point I couldn’t log in for about 3 hours.
I would have thought that google would be the top rank.
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you can find also such report but for different areas at http://blog.mon.itor.us, which is the blog page of http://mon.itor.us and http://www.monitis.com