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 sure xXxDragonTearsQTxXx, however, is quite pissed.
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.
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.
I will say that at least we slashdotters don't think we're "journalists."
Yet the word journalist is more apropos for a blogger than a media careerist. Going back to the dawn of the printing press, you see much more emotion and variety until fairly recent times.
The media now seems locked in with one another. It is all Reuters and UPI regurgitation.
Bloggers that focus on consistency float to the top. My favorite 5 bloggers offer 80% of the news I read -- some of them are ex-media writers. I also read some blogs just to get a sens of alternate opinions.
My 5 blogs (2 public, 3 private) replace my e-mail newsletter (2 years running) that replaced my print newsletter (3 years before the e-news). My readership is down 95% as I attempt to transition, but I'm getting a much better view on who is reading and who isn't.
I'm committed to writing 7 days a week. I already spend 2-3 hours reading links mailed to me, why not set those links up for others with similar ideas? Is my attached opinion wanted by the readers? Only time will tell.
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 :)
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.
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 always thought bloggers were pre-programmed robots that spilled out random text. This source code proves it, I tell ya! ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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
> ...to call blog content "data".
They still call all that stuff between the genes "DNA"
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I can handle certain word inventions like blog, blogger, AJAX, even Web 2.0 ... but for god's sake ... BLOGOSPHERE?
-tom
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???
No... just makes it more 1337.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"