(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Global uptime monitoring service CheckMySite.com (www.checkmysite.com) has reported that popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter (www.twitter.com), has not improved upon its less-than-perfect record of reliability.
The uptime statistics of the front page of Twitter.com show that over the past 12 months, the site has failed to show an increase in uptime, according to CheckMySite.com, which continually monitored it for the past year.
Named the “worst performing” social media site by uptime monitoring service provider Pingdom(www.pingdom.com) in early 2008, Twitter has continued to suffer considerable downtime in 2009, including a nasty DDoS attack that kept Twitter offline for roughly three hours according to reports from both Pingdom and rival monitoring firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com). Despite NTT America’s efforts to bolster Twitter’s performance, including the leasing of a 15,000-square-foot data center in Santa Clara, California, to provide Twitter managed hosting services, it seems that Twitter’s popularity still outpaces its hosting infrastructure.
A chart of Twitter’s uptime shows that it has been sporadically staying around the 99.7 percent mark — which is too low according to CheckMySite.com.
For the purpose of comparison, CheckMySite.com also monitored Facebook and MySpace, which both scored an uptime of 100 percent, meaning there is virtually no occurrence of frustrated access among visitors.
“Any company that has an uptime statistic of less than 99.9 percent should definitely work to improve the situation,” Stock said. “After all, downtime is never helpful. Instead, it costs money, damages your reputation and decreases page views. It is our business, as a global monitoring service, to keep our clients informed of their site performance so that potential problems can be handled proactively. There is simply no reason that any major site should accept the occurrence of downtime.”
