Slashdot Mirror
Blog Services Outgrow Their Data Centers
miller60 writes "The growth of the blogosphere is straining the infrastructure at popular service providers. TypePad is having serious problems again today, the latest in a series of outages and malfunctions as it switches to a larger facility. Bloglines is also apologizing for performance problems, and says it too will move to a larger data center to accommodate growth. There's been no sign of a mass migration from either service. Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?"
Damn! I can't access my blog! I have to blog about this... uh... damn.
Absolutely not. They will all stop blogging en masse and the blogosphere will cease to exist. What a brilliant question.
Random is the New Order.
Yes.
Please reference: the Microsoft product line
Yea, there is Google Blogspot ... but even the big "G" has had
performance issues in the past. An option for /. readers is to
host a blog on your own site ... but that's not realistic
for the average Joe. This stuff is all free, so I think most
people are willing to grin and bear and suffer through some outages.
Plus I don't think the world is going to end if we are unable
to blog for a short while ... ;-)
P.S. Per my /. username, I did get a chuckle out of this quote from Bloglines - "Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk"
and yea, getting angry and transforming into a
Big Green Monster can really
wreck your clothing budget.
Your summary implies that the latest Typepad outage has something to do with their datacenter move of October. It does not. They had a hard drive problem that they noticed during routine maintenance.
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
It just seems that more and more people are finding a new way to express themselves. This started off just as a trend but has grown like wildfire. This has replaced the use of the diary, and for many people, it also replaces idle chit-chat of catching up on, "So what did you do today?" This leaves a lot of conversation on more focused conversation. As well, it also lets people keep in touch with each other easier than before. I mean, is anyone surprised that these things continue to grow with popularity? It doesn't seem like an unnatural progression to me.
Are we really surprised? How many people use the Internet on atleast a quasi-regular basis? I'm willing to bet that currently a large percentage either writes or reads a blog (likely both), and that those numbers are going to continue to increase.
-Da3vid-
In other news, world continues to turn, sky still up there. Film at 11.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Our willingness to accept rocky performance from popular services is the only reason we're still reading Slashdot today...:-)
I'm not saying the blogosphere is the most useless thing on the net, because I really favor slashdot.
I will say that at least we slashdotters don't think we're "journalists."
Changa hates change.
I'm sure xXxDragonTearsQTxXx, however, is quite pissed.
Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?"
if they believe the rocky performance is temporary
then Yes
else No
It's the advertisers who should be angry. They're the ones paying for these services. They rely on the readers to view the web pages and buy their products.
Of course not. They'll give money to the guy who can host their blog with better performance and reliability, perhaps by soliciting donations from readers (like every webpage does). A few new businesses could even open and employ people just to host blogs, at least until the fad dies down. Everybody who invests with intelligence wins.
That most blogs are inactive and only used by blog spamming scripts. Also keep in mind that people this is a slow time. Most people have other stuff to do (don't know what bloggers are doing.... do bloggers have families?) and if there is such a thing like a good time to redo stuff, it is in the next two weeks.
Finally, I'm sure Bush or someone will cockup and give the bloggers something more substantial to complain about other than the speed and performance of typepad.
Agreed. It's a silly question. It's like asking; will bloggers accept the problems that come with growth? Do they have a choice?
I don't blog - does this mean I'm a loser?, or does this mean I can keep my high-speed?
Because you're looking at it all wrong, it's not just a service, it's a community. For the Same reasons people won't just let New Orleans go they won't leave these communities at the first sign of trouble. Sociology is a science that needs to be applied to the web more and more...
lol, overgrown blogs services.
a rity
i rst-mass-producible-quantum-computer-chip.html
Is that a sign of this?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singul
well if that isn't, maybe this is?:
http://www.quantumbiocommunication.com/computer/f
Stories like these make me happy that I am the one person who doesn't have a blog.
I remember that when ISPs first started, they were all flaky, but we loved what we could do on the net. We tolerated outages because we knew that all ISPs had roughly the same failure rate and so switching wouldn't improve much.
The current situation with blogs looks about the same.
Blog services are sticky when they form a community of sorts. If you like the people you know through those services, you stick around. And if your web address is based on their site (i.e. xxx.blogspot.com), well, moving will cause you to lose all your readers, too.
So I would say the answer is yes, that people will stick to the services they enjoy, because they know that if they move, they'll get about the same level of service.
D
Seriously just spend the 3-5 bucks a month and get some basic hosting. Its worth the cost cause you don't even have to know how to build a site. You can just install the solutions given to you by the host or one you download. I think more people should consider this because I'm less interested in blogs from websites like blogger.com because it requires just blabbing once a day and nothing else so I tend to think the quality is slightly lower. This may just be in my head but I think this is a really good reason for people consider homebrew blogs.
Bloglines is apologising for performance problems, and you're going to Slashdot them on top of that? Guess that shows what people think of bloggers around here :)
It's important to keep in mind that the bulk of Bloggers have no interest in setting anything up from scratch and less interest in paying for it if they know it will be relatively reliable. Top tier Bloggers are already running their own sites and invest in connectivity and design and for the most part are untouched by service interuptions. So...the cynic in me wonders if these service interuptions are used as a catalyst to get some people to pay for a premium service. Just a thought.
I dunno how much foresight went into this question: "Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?", but it obviously wasn't enough.
People who use these popular services probably aren't smart enough to set up their own blogs, like 'professional' bloggers do. 'Pro' bloggers host their own blogs, and consequently aren't going to max out their webhosts data center.
And let's not forget, it's only temporarily 'rocky'.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
My big question is where on earth do these ppl get the money to run these services??
Sure they have ads and stuff.. but do ppl really click those ads? Very rarely do I ever click ads.
Livejournal has its problems now and then, but it's been pretty reliable.
If the outage was every other day or something, I could see a mass migration but when you've built up a blog/livejournal/etc. you cannot just pack it up and move it most of the time so you just stay an deal. Plus there is the social networking factor involved as well.
Plus it is not like users are getting shafted. LiveJournal has had problems come up once in a while and they compensate thier users for it with things like an extra month of service free and stuff like that.
Outages happen and it are a fact of life on the Internet.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
I dunno the failure of the borken services at least gives us a chance for humour. I get a kick out of the "IT Professional Solution" guys. There are quite a few out there who have learned to set up "Moveable Type" etc and now advertise themselves as "IT Professionals". Priceless, but they never get the joke.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
...to call blog content "data".
I grabbed some huge satellite photos from the tsunami devastated areas and had 300,000 visitors in a couple of weeks using blogspot. I used bittorrent to host the media files but that much traffic would have killed most other hosts regardless. I'm now on my own server using Wordpress because blogger.com did start to get frustratingly slow but if I got hit with another traffic spike I'd be toast.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?
Like the legions of users who cope with the sometimes-rocky performance World of Warcraft? If some of these users are one and the same, the answer is yes.
I see several comments here about paying the $5/month and hosting the site yourself. Makes since to me, and I've been doing that for quite a while now. I've recently starting using blogging software from blogger.com for my personal site instead of writing my pages from scratch because it makes it really easy to put up new pictures of the kids. However, I'm not sure how I feel about committing to a particular site like Blogger, even if I do host the site myself, as the blogging community shifts and twists as it grows.
What software is out there that's easy to set up that's more of a homegrown solution? I know of Moveable Type, but is there something else that the Slashdot crowd uses?
BTW: Am I the only one who thinks the term "blog" grates on his nerves much like "information superhighway" does?
--Lance
When you consider the amount of inane chatter on blogs this really doesn't come as a surprise. I'm contributing to the chatter by posting this.
...that MySpace is also having "database issues" today. There was (is?) a message up preventing me from logging on about an hour ago...
Shane
Who cares about blogs, too many blogs. Everybody including the latest sony robot writes a blog.
to go outside for a change.
I don't see any problem with my immensely popular Blog :-P
09:11:22 up 29 days, 1:04, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Ok... somebody please fill me in... What is a blog? Is it a forum? Is it an article? Is it something only the 14-18 year old crowd is into? What exactly is a "blog" because im just old and this terminology is beyond me. I have only recently (within the last year) seen all this shit about "Blogs". They even talk about this shit on the TV.
I ran a BBS back in the early '90s, does that make me a blog master?!?!?
...recent posts. Hopefully they'll be restored in due time.
Ah well, at least my fascinating StringBuffer.append() post is safe!
The Army reading list
I can handle certain word inventions like blog, blogger, AJAX, even Web 2.0 ... but for god's sake ... BLOGOSPHERE?
-tom
"Along Interstate 5, in the heart of San Diego, you can still see the scars of that deluge; they're the remains of long trenches in the pavement dug as part of a frantic push to add more lines to the Sony facility."
See the report on sony data center that backs Everquest.
There's a very good reason I use WordPress myself... in fact, there's several, partially because I got fed up with Blogger and partially because it lets me run everything on my server, on my terms.
;-)
The one problem is that this server is a single 700MHz Duron system with 256MB of memory that my friend and I have running out of my house (it was at his originally, long story about why it moved). And it doesn't help that it's on my home Internet connection, and also running (along with my blog) the homepages of Ultima Linux, several other, smaller projects, and not to mention the rest of my homepage.
Hmm, maybe if I had my own data center...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
A lot of bloggers put up with the outages and rockiness because they've got an established "community" on their servers. Blogs are becoming more and more itegrated with social networking. If you were already in one with many friends, would you migrate at the drop of a hat, or would you ride it out?
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Blogging is a passing fad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
How will I ever get on with my life, knowing some blog sites are down? Oh I just don't know how I can cope. Oh... ah... ah. Oh, there. I'm coping. Oh well.
Doesn't matter - They've got no choice. Very few of these bloggers are going to just say "Screw this" and get their own webhost/domain name. Most will just put up with "Gee, my lj has been laggy lately. Oh well."
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Can you mispell something in 1337?
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
My setup:
Setting up taught me things I didn't know about MySQL, Apache and Ubuntu and I don't have to rely on a third party provider.
Profit???
deviantART is a site that allows people to post their 'art' to the site. Its not necessarily down, however the site tends to get unresponsive, images appear and dissapear and the service continues to grow. Its not about service, quality and speed its about being in with the 'it' crowd.
A coworker recently quoted an article where someone had five iPods of various generations. All of them had broken and had been replaced, again obviously for this man it was not about quality but about having the rep of holding the newest nanon in his hands to show the coworkers.
People like to feel like they belong, these places allow them to congregate into flocks of sheep. Nothing new really and its going to take a LOT of puishment before they move off to any other alternative out there!
Great thinking, lets put links to services that are already complaining about having bandwidth problems and ./ them...brilliant, bloody brilliant
That's not a slashdotting. That's just getting warmed up. This is a slashdotting:
4:16PM up 2 minutes, 1 user, load averages: 0.1, 0.27, 0.51
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Such as the downtime and issues that pestered MySpace until the Fox Empire bought it?
4:16PM up 4 days, 6:24, 2740 users, load averages: 8.44, 7.42, 3.38
Mood: Slashdotted.
Music: Funeral March
"well today my boyfriend told me that he wants to kiss my pineapple, ROFLMAO-COPTER.
He's so k3wl and l33t, I think I'm going to suck his r0d after engrish class, LOL!
My girlfriend stole my sanwich today, I'm going to kill her, the bitch, I can steal a can of gass from #8%@78)
SERVICE UNAVAILABLE
hit refresh or try again later.
This wouldn't be a problem is Bloglines and Typepad had euthanasia for its bloggers. It would definatly improve the service.
Pay per view/click... Or does anyone actually pay flat rate for web page ads?
Deleted
and imagine what if they created such "stupid simple" tools to keep the journals everywhere in synch. That way, a blog can be seen in all communities no matter what its "home" provider is. It's a lot like open standards for office documents.
I'm absolutely positive this will happen one day, and LiveJournal's OpenID project is the first step towards it. It will probably take at least five years though.
I realize that this wasn't the point of your post, but you really shouldn't make blanket statements like that, especially with a Slashdot user number as low as yours that implies that you're not a idiot teenager.
Try this: for one week, get the print New York Times (available at newstands nationwide) and spend an hour reading it. Just start on section A page 1 and try to read every article. Don't just bounce around pages, really try to read at least the first paragraph of every story. Chances are that you will be completely sucked into, and perhaps even enlightened by, several stories in that day's paper. So much so that you'll find yourself later thinking about the story, quoting it in conversation, blogging about it, etc. Food for the brain.
And don't think that reading your regular local paper (wherever that is) is the same ... you really need try one of the old stalwarts like the NYT, WSJ or LAT.
A good newspaper is more than just a regurgitation of the wire services, and far more than the opinion-heavy/content-lite blogosphere. Sure everyone's entitled to their opinion, but don't think it's a substitute for a real newspaper experience.
This isn't likely to get modded up, so really the only person that's ever going to read this is you, Mr. Dada21. I urge you to just try the print NYT for a week.
Trying to give a clue one person at a time,
Chris
One simple rule for its versus it's
n/t
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.