Uptime watchdog Pingdom has a new survey out that should be required reading for anyone who has stored — or is tempted to store — anything that may be needed at a moment’s notice with an online storage service.
The three month’s worth of data collected on 16 such services shows an enormous difference between the best and worst when it comes to downtime, as in only 5 minutes for the top dog and 66 hours for the mutt.
The survey covered a range of services from the popular Megaupload to lesser lights that may never shine any brighter if they don’t shape up. (Megaupload fared well in this test, coming in at No. 4 with 72 minutes of downtime over three months.)
“Whether they are business documents, videos or images, once the files have been uploaded from your computer to the online storage service of your choice, your ability to share these files depends on the availability (uptime) of the service you are using,” writes Pingdom. “Many of these storage services also offer paid options, often as online storage solutions for companies and advanced users. That makes it even more important that they have a very high availability. After all, a file storage solution is useless if you cannot access your files.”
Seems straightforward enough.
I’ve sent e-mail inquiries to the three worst performers — mytempdir.com, quicksharing.com and bigupload.com — in an attempt to hear what they have to say for themselves.
I’m not holding my breath, but will share whatever replies arrive.
Meanwhile, the service with the best uptime record — MailBigFile.com — hasn’t been at all shy about trumpeting its stellar results, having already posted a smugly satisfied message on its homepage that reads:
We would like to apologize for the 5 minutes of downtime in the last three months.
Pingdom performed a survey of the uptime of 16 online storage services during June – Aug 2007.
“The service with the best uptime [MailBigFile] only had five minutes of downtime in three months, while the service with the worst uptime had more than 66 hours of downtime during the same period.”
View the full results and see how MailBigFile compares to its competitors.
Hey, when you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Uptime matters in every business, of course, whether you’re as good at it as Yahoo or as shaky as Bank of America. Seems as though these storage services have as much on the line as anybody, though, given that they’re promising to keep their customers’ important digital stuff safe and sound.
Readily available is an important part of safe and sound.
(Update from “Klass” at Bigupload.com: “We (had) some server breakdown in July, which caused some problems but not as much as you say. if you are pinging our servers, your IP may also be blocked automatically, by monitoring software we use. Hackers often use ping to find hosts, therefore icpm ping is filtered out, and blocked if too frequently.”)
