On the WordPress Outage

When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.

Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.

However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.

Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.

But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.

I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.

Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.

ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.

People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.

I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.

When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.

Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Introducing ServInt’s New Blog Server Line!

ServInt helps you spread your message

Yesterday we told you about SPORTSbyBROOKS, one of ServInt’s most popular blogging customers.

If you didn’t catch it, Brooks talked about the harrowing burst of traffic he experienced when he broke the infamous Tiger Woods story last November. After one phone call, ServInt built Brooks a custom solution that more than quintupled his previous resources, and we did it over Thanksgiving Day weekend!

So, needless to say, we have a great wealth of experience with high traffic blogs.

That’s why we’re excited to talk about our new Blog Server initiative! After consulting with our most popular blogging customers, we built the foundation of what we think will become the premiere blog servers in the world.

Our Blog Server line is a modification of our existing VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series products. They each feature the traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and come pre-loaded with cPanel/WHM. Most of the unique features of this line happen on the backend, making it even easier — not to mention faster — for us to upgrade VPS and SuperVPS customers with popular sites on the fly. This technology also allows us to further optimize the virtual environments on our Solo Series Dedicated servers which combine powerful Dedicated hardware with the flexibility of virtualization.

Because WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world right now, we’ve rolled out our new line with WordPress in mind. New customers will receive a detailed, step by step instruction guide on getting set up with WordPress along with their server turn up information.

While WordPress is certainly the most popular application, it is by no means the only one. Our Blog Servers are fully compatible with competing software such as TypePad, and can also be loaded with apps like Drupal or Joomla should you prefer to grow your blog in a different direction.

The point is, the choice is yours. Try getting that level of flexibility from free blogs.

What we’d like to make clear with this announcement is that it is, at its core, a foundational addition to our products. ServInt’s Blog Server line is proof of our ongoing commitment to what we believe to be the future of news and opinion on the web, and we’re incredibly proud to be a part of that.

Check out ServInt.net/blog for more info!