2007: The Year in Downtime

Pingdom has compiled a list of 13 major outages of 2007, which includes the July downtime at 365 Main's San Francisco data center, November outages at NaviSite/Alabanza (migration problems) and Rackspace (truck vs. transformer) as well as the flameout at RegisterFly. I can think of several incidents where downtime was more mission-critical - the Cyber Monday problems for Yahoo stores and migration woes at ValueWeb/Hostway probably had bigger business impact than outages at Twitter and Blogger - but these incidents collectively reinforced the value of uptime and reliability.

In the interest of equal time for catching folks doing things right, Netcraft has released its list of the most reliable hosting providers during November. The top performer is Fremont, Calif. colocation specialist Hurricane Electric, which had a perfect month - no downtime and no failed DNS requests - during November.