37Signals benchmarks uptime vs five leading webapps

Pingdom stats are a bit strange sometimes. For our services (check my profile if you want to know), a normal month is 100% uptime, simple. But sometimes, your website is marked as down because they have an issue. Several times, we had downtime because of errors between their servers in California and us in Europe where I was able to backtrace them as a network issue deep in California.<p>So, like any stats, take them with a bit of salt.

Do note that Pingdom, unless specifically configured otherwise, counts a successful HTTP request as uptime. If that HTTP request is returning a page saying "our database servers are down, try again later", it still shows as uptime.<p>You can configure it to send POST data and expect a particular response, but there's no way of telling (other than "yep, that's what we're doing") whether someone's uptime stats are based on that sort of check.

This is one of those posts that drives me a little crazy :P<p>We recently started a web monitoring company (in beta) <a href="http://www.verelo.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.verelo.com</a> to tackle situations just like this. Pingdom monitors every 60 seconds, its just not enough if you want to make claims like "we were only down for 6 minutes". If you want to make claims at a single digit minute level you need to check more regularly, and your checks need to be robust. We offer monitors that check as regularly as every 5 seconds.<p>We're going to monitor those same 6 sites for the next 30 days using our service at Verelo and provide comparative results when the next 37signals blog post comes out.

Looks like 37Signals are preparing to launch their Basecamp.Next.<p>Y'all can see how there's been an increasing of 37Signals posts lately.

One of the comments in the blog is: "Just signed up for pingdom and they sent me my password via email in clear. Great!"<p>I signed up to check if they really do. What pingdom does upon sign-up with your email id they send a password via email.<p>I have a high opinion of pingdom &#38; I was expecting them to enforce change of password during first login, but that did not happen!

Looks like 37signals changed a bit in 6 years : <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_is_for_walmart.php" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_scale_99999_uptime_i...</a>

6 minutes downtime for Github? Github is amazing. That's all. :-)

The stats are only for a 6-week period which in no way a great indicator of the "uptimes" of a product. Curious to know how they fared the whole of previous year.

I loved the second comment from DHH replying to GB:<p><pre><code> I didn’t think it was a very long article? Your first comment missed the first paragraph and your second comment missed the second paragraph. There’s only two more paragraphs to go, so please take a swing at them :)</code></pre>

It's incredible, every little thing posted on 37signals gets upvoted on Hacker News, even if it is devoid of information! Why is that?<p>Well as usual I feel like the guy who rants all over the place, hehe.

Is this uptime measuring hardware, software or both?

I am curious on the choices of the 5 companies to compare against. The amount of load a site deals with is an important factor when comparing uptime.