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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?"

11 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Aboslutely Not by Drakonian · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Are bloggers and blog readers willing to accept rocky performance from popular services?

    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.
  2. Oh please God. by Changa_MC · · Score: 1, Insightful
    They will all stop blogging en masse and the blogosphere will cease to exist

    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."

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    Changa hates change.
  3. who cares about the bloggers? by Stevyn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Good for them! by redelm · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The only reason they're outgrowing their servers and links is that more and more people are finding them popular. Whether I agree or not with their viewpoint, I'm always happy to see people finding what makes them happy. Even moreso, because the growth is likely to be from moderates -- the real fringies were already there.

  5. All things may be equal. by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  6. Re:Yes they will by Kelson · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Exactly. When LiveJournal has technical problems for a few days, people don't leave LiveJournal en masse -- they wait it out. Because the whole point of being on LiveJournal is the community. Their friends, readers, etc. are all on the same service, and moving to a new one is going to involve dragging them along. On the other hand, if you and a bunch of friends do decide to leave, you'll probably end up migrating together.

    Ever tried using a LiveJournal account to comment on a Myspace blog? Not gonna work. (Ironically, the people behind LiveJournal are the ones who set up OpenID, which may make this possible some day.)

    This is, of course, a generalization. You can find blogs on LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger, etc. that are aimed at a general audience and have simply chosen a hosting provider. But in most cases, you'll find that the active readers -- the ones who hold conversations in the comment threads -- are all on the same blogging service.

  7. Money Money Money by Rac3r5 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Problems accessing... by TubeSteak · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lucky for me, I can post on CmdrTaco's Blog and laugh at your misfortune.

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    o0t!
  9. Re:Problems accessing... by afidel · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Damn, this kind of deserves an insightful mod. If you had been around since the beginning you would realize that slashdot kind of started out with Rob posting one of the origional blogs =)

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  10. Re:submitter, you suck by aiken_d · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Funny thing is, a single drive can take a RAID down. The data is still there on the other drives, but a misbehaving/fried drive can trash the SCSI bus and bring down the entire thing.

    The answer, of course, is a seperate controller per drive, with logic on the host to close down a controller that's gone berzerk because of bad input from the drive (electrical or logical). But that's not the way the fast majority of RAID systems work, and therefore, it's not all that uncommon to crash a server when a single drive fails. Heck, I've had hot spares fail and crash an array (crash = lock up, not lose data). The humorous irony is usually not really appreciated until days later.

    Cheers
    -b

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  11. Re:Self Hosting by ScottCooperDotNet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Most people are happy to put up with ads in exchange for not having to setup a server and DynDNS, power, etc. You get the geek accolades, but the average blogger is not a geek, it's someone who posts soupy drek.