WebProNews

It’s nice to have a popular site, but if the popularity becomes overwhelming, the owner will (temporarily) be left without a site at all.  According to a new Royal Pingdom survey, that may be what happened to the people at BlinkList.

The social bookmarking site has experienced exactly 20 hours and eleven minutes of downtime since May 3 of this year - that works out to about a 96 percent “success” rate, which sounds pretty respectable.  But, unfortunately for BlinkList, Royal Pingdom also measured its competitors’ downtime, and the results put BlinkList to shame.

Fark, Slashdot, Netscape, and Digg didn’t go down for as much as a single minute.  Del.icio.us was down for just five, and Meneame and StumbleUpon trailed with 24 and 33 minutes of downtime, respectively.

The next three social bookmarking sites did notably worse, but still not as poorly as BlinkList.  Royal Pingdom measured one hour and 28 minutes of downtime for Reddit, two hours and six minutes for Newsvine, and four hours and 28 minutes for Furl.

And, yes, then there’s BlinkList, with its 20 hours and six minutes.  I mean, goodness, by the time we reach a number as high as “20,” we’re supposed to represent it with digits, not numbers.  And the outages weren’t just quick blips; Royal Pingdom reports, “The longest individual downtime for the Blinklist website was 4 hours and 46 minutes.”

Royal Pingdom offered “[o]ne possible explanation,” however, which “could be that Blinklist is having scaling issues (a.k.a. growing pains).”  For BlinkList’s sake, let’s hope that’s the case, or else the company and site could be in for a shrinking user base.