Blogger hosting is pathetic

Today, like many days, I find that I can't read the weblogs of several of my friends whose blogs are hosted by Blogger (i.e. the ones that have "blogspot" in their URL). It's gotten to the point with Blogger sites where if the page starts taking too long to load (which is an even more prevalent problem than the complete outages) I simple cancel the process and skip their blog. Then I summarily assume that Blogger is experiencing a complete outage and avoid visiting any Blogger hosted site until the next day. Perhaps I'm too impatient, but the whole point of the web is to make it easy and convenient to retrieve information. I use RSS so as to avoid having to visit multiple sites just to see if they've updated; I'm not going to start visiting the same site multiple times just to see if it has recovered from an outage.

I know that Ev Williams is a great guy and I'm glad people are supporting him by staying with Blogger, but I wish my friends would move to another location. Anyway, it's not about Ev Williams anymore. Google runs Blogger, and has for quite a while now. Certainly for long enough to have sorted out the problem of outages and server overload. Didn't Google acquire expertise in running battalions of servers years ago? How hard could it be to properly run the servers that host Blogger sites? Maybe Google doesn't care about those sites, which would actually make sense for a corporation that didn't derive significant revenue from that service. Corporations don't like things just because they're cool and innovative; they like profits and there's nothing wrong with that.

And I think there is nothing wrong with abandoning a web-hosting service that doesn't provide the level of service you'd like to have.

Comments

[bitingtongue]

{laugh} blogger's back up. They claim it was a DOS attack... so, for once, not much you can blame on 'em except that they made some enemies. Have patience with us, we'll probably make the jump one of these days. I'm just not willing to give up a saturday to make the switch just yet....

[Mike]

I have a Blogger-based blog. You can tell by looking at the bottom of my blog. It is not hosted at blog*spot though. Ernie, you and "bitingtongue" are a little sloppy in confusing the Blogger CMS with the blog*spot blog hosting service.

If a blog*spot customer wants to move to a different host, it seems like it would be trivial to use the existing Blogger account to (a) set-up a new blog or (b) republish the entire existing blog to a new server/URL.

On your point about implementing big scaleable web services: I bet that they are still running a beefed-up version of Pyra's system, and that the Googlers know that such a state is not a long-term plan. They may not appreciate exponential growth as well as they think they do, and therefore they may have failed to schedule the required growth/rearchitecture/whatever-needed to keep everyone happy.

[Sheila]

Could also be because many of us Blogger/Blog*spot people are too new at this and the idea of switching is scary. Ok, or maybe just me. But I bet I'm not the only one. I picked Blogger because it was easy. Now I'm looking into other things, but it's scary. I don't want to lose everything I've already posted. I'm stuck between a rock and an undereducated place. But I'm reading a lot of books, checking for online support, and asking people. I wish I had some friends who did this kinda thing. Right now I'm all Blanche DuBois, relying on the kidness of strangers.

[Robert]

I started a website using blogger and blogspot almost two years ago (the last few posts are still there, the rest of the archives went the way of the Dodo). It is easy, that's for sure. But the downside is that it's also slow and un-reliable. If your goal is to have someplace to keep an online journal, and you don't care whether anyone reads it, or that your archives remain stable, then Blogspot is for you.

About four months ago, another lawyer who knew I had a website called me asking about setting up one of his own. He was asking about Moveable Type (which is what I'm using now) and other systems. The advice I gave him was pretty simple: if you're not sure you're going to actually stick with blogging, then you might want to try blogspot as your host. Eventually, though, for the problems noted above, you'll likely want to switch.

If you're interested Sheila, you might check out the Movable Type home page. Using MT to update your website is every bit as easy as blogspot; it's the setup that can be tricky. I have a friend who works in the web-department at a large online retailer, and he was kind enough to set me up. If you're not so lucky, you might try to find someone to do it for you for a small fee.

Good luck.

[Ernie]

I agree with Robert, but you don't' need a friend in the tech world. TypePad is run by the same folks that run Movable Type, but it includes hosting and is easier to run than a MT site (even one that has been set up for you by a techie). Trust me, TypePad is the way to go.

[Pop!]

I'm gradually getting into the various aspects of blogging. I use Blogger for both content-management and hosting and I can't recall having had any problems with them thus far. I think Blogger's good. Then again, they host my brain too, so how should I know? (Joke!)

As I'm slowly starting to get my head around web-design, it has come to my attention that Blogger's templates normally use embedded stylesheets. In my blog the stylesheet adds about 5KB of code to each page. Perhaps this extra bandwidth-usage accounts for much of Blogger's perceived slowness?

I plan to use external stylesheets to make my blog speedier, but less technically-inclined bloggers are a bit stuck as far as I can see...

[Pop!]

I really should have checked the date on this post and these other comments... Then I'd have realised: Of course Blogger's better now — they've had over two years to fix it up!