In 2011, Heroku was down for 76 hours in one incident alone.
And that's all before you get to the hubris of the assumption that your custom coded setup will perform better. A more sensible argument would be to move to a host with a better proven uptime record, such as Blogger (nearly 100%).
The 'one incident' was the AWS outage that brought much, much more than Heroku down, and their post-mortem was fairly impressive, as far as that sort of thing goes.
I'm not saying you don't have a point, but imo your comparison of Heroku's 76 vs. Tumblr's 42 is not apples-to-apples. I think you have to at least put an asterisk by the 76. What OP is complaining about is a early-Twitter-days-like unreliability over a long interval, not a one-time outage that has a single explanation and for which Heroku took completely responsibility.
For my part, at the moment at least, I still have more confidence in Heroku than Tumblr, 76 vs 42 notwithstanding.
The quoted down time for Tumblr is site wide. Sites are often down for non site wide times. I know from experience. Don't host on Tumblr unless you're MG Siegler and Tumblr will put you on a priority pool that goes down much less.
> I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3 root object
You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for having .html in URLs.
The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let you host naked domains.
Naked domains as in "example.com" without the www? Just name your bucket without the www and it will work. You can then do a javascript redirect from a simple index page at www.example.com (google has said that they now follow javascript redirects. My play example "http://whitewatersearch.com
I wonder how many hours would pass before you caught this and set up a new server? What if you're on vacation?
Honestly there's a little bit of "because I did it myself and I'm awesome it won't fail." That's hubris and very typical of young engineers.
Letting someone else manage it for you is probably the right thing for a startup to do. You just need to choose someone with a good, proven uptime record. That is what should guide your decision.. with so many things in engineering.
For a more fair comparison, I'll point out that the "skynet" Heroku outage you cited would have caused roughly 16 hours of downtime for the particular type of application used by the OP (a static site with no database), not 76.
Jekyll requires deploys to publish new content, and deploys were down for 76 hours. So, partial outage.
My point is if uptime is your goal you should go with a proven solution. Relying on an unproven custom setup to be 100% mistake free smacks a bit of young engineer hubris.
Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical.
tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The question is, does the community outweigh the downtime?
I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC tech).
In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a platform.
My startup's blog is on tumblr (http://blog.idonethis.com) and we get about 1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from social media.
Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting "regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers is much more difficult.
Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common place to meet your readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via reblogs).
Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its benefits.
I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases companies have multiple Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions. IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...)
I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as long as you're aware of costs + benefits.
A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts, Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host your company blog there, but do tumblr care about the uptime of that vs. the uptime of their dashboard?
There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.) Probably not a place I would put marketing material.
"A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely."
From their about page:
"What is Tumblr?
Millions of people sharing the things they do, find, love, think, or create."
Even if you can do more than a simple blog with tumblr, at its base it is a blogging platform. It's perfect for a startup that is busy doing lots of other things... if it wasn't for the fact that it's always down. I hope they'll someday add a "Always Up and running, no trouble" to their "30 reasons you'll love tumblr".
No, it's a micro-blogging platform. Traditional blog posts are something that have been shoehorned in to try and garner new audiences. Tumblr is never the right choice for an existing publication. That's why many fashion magazines have Tumblrs that run alongside their traditional blogs.
Yeah, I've always been surprised that people consider Tumblr as a platform for anything except hosting short posts (pictures/videos/clips/quotes/etc.) The brevity it [to me] encourages (plus the social features it has) places it somewhere closer to the Twitter side of a continuum between Twitter and Wordpress or Blogger. This is mostly in my head, of course, but I just didn't realize others felt differently until somewhat recently.
Akshay noticed I was so annoyed with Tumblr that he suggested I write this post detailing our move and urging other startups to do the same.
As much as this is a very staunch gesture, I think it's a very valid one. Tumblr has a huge, active, and connected community. It can be a great entry point for niche startups to find users and build an audience, but the performance and stability just does not cut the mustard.
I greatly want tumblr to succeed, their platform is very fresh, the theme garden model they have fits their mold perfectly (although the premium marketplace seems to be extremely esoteric) but I also hope this suggestion for startups to choose an alternative platform kicks tumblr in some sort of direction to improve the QoS.
It is still possible to create a Tumblr blog that pulls the RSS from your site, though. You can just tell it to only display the URL and title so you don't get an SEO mess.
Not perfect, of course, but it still gives you a slight chance to use Tumblr's amazing sharing platform.
You are correct. That's actually one of my favorite features tumblr has, it reminds me much of a site I used back in the 2000's called SideBlog. It worked exactly the same way, drop in a line of javascript and it pulled in your posts and you could design everything around it.
This kind of reinforces my earlier commentary, tumblr has some great features and awesome integration, but their performance and reliability always make me steer clear when needing to put up a blog for a client.
A Tumblr blog may not be the best solution but spending that many resources on a blog (especially one not featured in the main navigation) is usually out of the question for most startups.
For most startups the amount of time invested for a custom Jekyll setup and a downtime script could be replaced with a new feature or a better product/home page.
I think its important for startups not to spend too much time blogging unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the product/company. Make the product better first. If your blog host (Tumblr) isn't stable enough, wordpress it and be done with it.
I would caution this making sure to note "it depends on the startup". If your industry pays attention to blogs it's very much worth devoting large amounts of effort to capturing this attention. I as much as the next programmer need the _focus on marketing_ mantra pounded into my head time and time again.
See 37signals blog, seomoz blog, and every piece of advice patio11 has ever written.
I spent 1/2 a day building a blog (including RSS support). I wanted an integrated visual experience that stayed up to date as the website changed (which it is doing a lot right now) and took advantage of the same underlying db and hosting infrastructure. Trying to do that with a different blog engine would have meant tweaking the blog every day, which would be far more effort.
I agree with this notion. I would never use a 3rd party blog engine with it's own branding/UI and use that for my own site which has naturally a different branding/UI.
It's like having an @aol.com email address rather than your own domain. It looks unprofessional at best.
Strangely enough I find that I am more inclined to read company's blog if it is visibly hosted on a dedicated blog site, Tumblr and Posterious included. Based on this observation I did a bit of testing of <product>.tumblr.com vs blog.<product>.com and former generated more foot traffic from Twitter link drops. Haven't tried www.<product>.com/blog though, it might well outperform both options.
I run a news site on Tumblr and I can tell you my downtime problems are nowhere near as bad as this site suggests they are. In the past three months I can remember only one major bout of downtime, and I'm on the site most of the day every day.
And in the case that downtime is as bad as it seems, I suggest you guys use CloudFlare, which will at least keep a cached version of your site online even during downtime issues.
Tumblr is way more about community than mission-critical uptime. If you treat it like mission-critical uptime, you're going to be disappointed. If you're trying to reach an audience for your application — which, honestly, should be more important with a staff blog — Tumblr is a great bet.
Another problem with hosting with Tumblr is that you can't host the blog on the same domain as your app. The usual solution is to host the blog at blog.example.com. The problem with this is that subdomains are treated by google as a separate domain, so any google juice flowing to your blog does not help your main domain. With SEO, one of the most important things is incoming links and if you split your incoming links across multiple domains, the sum is actually less than the whole. The best solution is to host your blog in a subfolder on your main domain (e.g. example.com/blog).
Unfortunately not. I don't think this is actually possible as I don't think you can have a subfolder of a site hosted elsewhere (not in a 'performant' manner at least).
The only solution that I know of is to host it all on the one box which makes it trick if you want to use Heroku to host your app.
I am currently wrestling with this problem as I want to host a new app on Heroku, but have the marketing side of the site powered by wordpress to take advantage of things like third party themes. The app will also generate linkable content, so it is important to me to have it on the same domain, but there seems to be no way to achieve what I want to do with heroku :-(
I've read about people who use workarounds on the Cedar stack for different purposes. Did you think about running two different heroku instances for the same app? With both on instances on Cedar stack, one instance can be running the rails part while the other instance runs the php.
I just read the DotCloud docs and they do a lot of stuff including php and ruby, you might want to check them out to see if they run both in the same instance.
Interesting. I'll check out the ability to run two different heroku instances for the same app to see if that can help. If you could point me to any literature on the subject it would be very much appreciated.
I'll ckeckout DotCloud as well. Thanks for the heads up!
We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL to embed.
Another vote for Posterous. I also like the simple customization, and the fact that I can easily add new members/contributors - a nice feature for a company blog.
Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical?
PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page for.
I dunno, it's definitely part of their brand. I would sort-of think twice before trusting a company that couldn't even keep a simple blog up-and-running. 3rd parties don't necessarily know or notice that it's hosted by tumblr.
On the other hand, when I'm looking around for a service and I' trying to figure out whether I should spend cash on a company, I do check out the blog. A blog that goes down, in my head, is a service that goes down, even if I know it to be untrue objectively.
Agreed, we didn't have anything too interesting in recent past but we're going to start ramping that up. Especially after checking out rand fishkin's presentation about inbound marketing.
I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media uploader (http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file) which is used for js files, external css, images, etc.
Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have way more loading problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience.
Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.
It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone (unless you kept local copies manually).
It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have control over.
I used to have a blog on my personal domain (not saying it was incredibly insightful), and I got tired of updating wordpress. One day the wordpress update failed, and I just took down the blog and now it is gone.
My livejournal blog however, which I set up over 10 years ago (and haven't updated in 7 years) is still there in it's embarassing completeness.
maybe it's because of the location of the servers? they seem to be west coast, i'm east coast and can't remember the last time i had trouble loading a tumblr blog
I think ultimately you will see complaints against almost every service and you will be left with one choice. Host your own. And then that has its own shortcomings. So we can conclude that everything has risks no matter what. It's up to you to assess and decide which risks you can tolerate.
After the initial creation of a Jekyll blog, "managing an entire blog infrastructure" is insanely easy and low maintenance.
It's a static site, so you can host incredibly easily on any number of cloud services, from heroku to AWS S3/CloudFront, many (most?) people keep their Jekyll sites in a git repo (often github) so you won't lose data, and can easily shove it onto another server in no time at all.
Really, it's less maintenance than pretty much anything I've ever had online.
I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime.
A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example:
* Is it generally stable, but only going down in peak load situations (obviously no good if you know peak load occurs when you are doing critical new product release/sales etc, but may be okay if you peak load corresponds to non-critical events).
* How long is the outages? If it goes down for 1 minute each day, that may be more acceptable compared to '100%' uptime except one day when it goes out for 365 minutes.
All of that affects the impact that the downtime has on your venture - it's quite possible you might have 'poor' uptime stats, but it has zero effect on your business, in which case the cost/effort savings from using a 'poorer uptime' hosted service may be worth it.
I think it's more important to know _when_ the downtime occurs vs. the percentage itself.
If the site is down from 12am to 6am due to some botched maintenance, I really don't care, as traffic will be minuscule, if not non-existent for our core market. And 6 hours of downtime is a killer for uptime percentage.
The "Jekyll is so easy! It's the easiest thing I've ever maintained!" argument reminds me of Andy Rubin's now infamous quote about the openness of Android: "the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u it://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"
The point of Tumblr is I don't need to maintain _anything_!
Picplum is focusing on quality rather than optimizing on price. Our prints are considerably higher quality with premium archival lustre paper (much thicker), better packaging-- We're selling an experience not cheap prints with an ecommerce add-to-cart-then-select-sizes experience.
Happy to report that price has not been an issue and we have many happy return customers. Try it out and let us know what you think! Each new account has $5 in credits.
I thought Heroku only allowed dynamically-generated content (with static assets hosted elsewhere)
But the whole point of Jekyll is that it generates a static site.
What am I missing? (seriously)
I thought a starter Heroku account might work well for a side project I have cooking... Coincidentally, I was reading about Jekyll as something fun to try. Combining both of them would be pretty cool.
Heroku doesn't actively prevent you from hosting a static site. Yeah, heavy assets like images and video should be hosted elsewhere, but with HTML and stuff it's fine to just throw it in a static Git repo and use Heroku.
The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is 100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over super quick.
I'm in the amidst of launching my start-up CodePupil.com .
What I dig about Tumblr is how fast Google indexes posts from there due to it's popularity.
Thus, if your looking to HELP get your start-up's name listed in Google fairly quikcly, then a Tumblr or Posterous would be best to use. I posted a Tumblr "About us," yesterday and Google indexed it eight hours later.
Somewhat related gripe: does anybody like the admin UI in Tumblr? It seems like important settings are scattered all over the place. I don't understand why the site view and admin views are two discrete locations, either. Has the core service received much love since David Karp's first cut?
We recently moved our dev blog (dev.anideo.com) to jekyll + github pages as well, not because of problems with uptime but because gist support is a major pita on Tumblr and we primarily use our blog to post code snippets.
Another option that is out there in beta now is http://trillsy.com. You can use existing themes or your own design, it offers more user features, multiple contributors or posting from the public and also has an post type for events with an event calendar. It is worth checking out, beta keys are going out. In the interest of full disclosure this is my service, sorry about missing that when first posting.
The free trial will always be there, the beta key is a temporary requirement, a gate if you will, and extends the trial period. Plans are not entirely set, the entry plan will be low but it is not a free service, it is aimed at business primarily not a personal blog.
In 2011, Tumblr was down for 42 hours.
In 2011, Heroku was down for 76 hours in one incident alone.
And that's all before you get to the hubris of the assumption that your custom coded setup will perform better. A more sensible argument would be to move to a host with a better proven uptime record, such as Blogger (nearly 100%).
Sources: http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downti... https://status.heroku.com/incident/151