Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Recently I switched to the MediaTemple Grid Server, which at $20 a month, is much cheaper than a dedicated host. Although with ~15,000 hits a day I’m running close to the GPU limit, moving to a dedicated-virtual server is also just $50 a month. So–how well does Media Temple stay online? Do they suck like Dreamhost and 1and1?

The answer is no: Media Temple (MT) is pretty reliable. When I say pretty, here are some numbers from Pingdom, via their new free service:

Checks with downtime
Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.55% 3h 14m 52s 10 672 ms

This meant approximately 200 visitors would have missed out on my website–not a bad amount of downtime at all. However, this is just one month, and we’ll have to see if anything particularly disastrous shall happen in the future. I’ll keep you all posted!

Update: here are stats for August:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.92% 0h 34m 57s 6 905 ms

Update: here are stats for September:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.77% 1h 34m 36s 14 981 ms

Update: here are stats for October:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.50% 3h 39m 28s 15 582 ms

So far YTD my uptime is 99.69%, according to Pingdom.

My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee).

Yahoo 360 isn’t a real social network, but it had great uptime

The best of these is Yahoo 360, with 99.9938% uptime over the last two months, followed by Myspace (99.969%), Facebook (99.8822%), Linked In (99.7024%), and finally Windows Live (99.4482%). MySpace was only down for 25m, while MSN Live Spaces had an embarrassing 7hrs 25m of downtime.

This is cool. Uptime monitoring company Pingdom has released a tool and widget for monitoring the Apple store:

Now you don’t have to wait for blogs to post about when the Apple store is down, you can just check their awesome service. Apple is interesting in that they take their online store offline to update it with new products; in that regard, it’s cutely old-fashioned. This year, changes in the Apple store brought us the new iPhones, the Macbook Air, and new Shuffle prices.