Blog Service Data Center Outages Continue

Netcraft notes another outage hitting a popular blogging service, this time the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. The site was down for about 18 hour Monday as it grappled with the aftereffects of a power outage at its data center, which was operated by CRNC (Completely Reliable Network Concepts) of Denville, NJ. The provider's site doesn't offer any background on the power outage. The outage had broad impact because many bloggers integrate content from del.icio.us into their site. All in all, not a very good week for the blogosphere when it comes to reliability.

The business implications of these outages aren't quite on a par with an equivalent outage at a hosting provider serving the business sector. On some levels, the blogosphere is like one large affinity group, in which participants root for one another, are sympathetic when problems occur, and readily accept apologies for poor service. That's fortunate for Six Apart, whose recent performance would be a business disaster in any hosting niche other than blogging. The wide use of Movable Type has fostered considerable good will for the company. Bloglines and del.icio.us are separate cases because they're free services.