One of the hallmarks of the Internet experience in 2011 is the towering amount of blogs that are out there, waiting to be read by any online flaneur with some time to kill. The nice thing about blogs is that it’s easier than ever start one thanks to a number of blogging services that will host your content – most of the time for free – and provide you with all of the necessary tools to help you build your blog. The bad thing about blogs is that it’s easier than ever so anybody who has so much as walked by a keyboard has started a blog at some point. The term “critical mass” does not apply to blogs.

Since you’re about to get started on your blog any second now, Pingdom wants to help you lift-off. They’ve rated the top five blogging services so you’ll know which blogging service is the most reliable (least downtime) and which one to stay away from (most downtime) all so you can have and provide the best blogging experience ever.

The blogging services included in Pingdom’s surveyed were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr, and Posterous. Over the period of January to November of this year, they monitored each service to assess the total amount of downtime each service had. They used their own the monitoring service to test the services from multiple locations in North America and Europe. From each blogging service Pingdom monitored four different blogs to measure the amount of downtime experienced by each.

And the winner is…

Google’s blogging service, Blogger! Pingdom found that Blogger was down only a minute and a half each month. That’s some incredible reliability. I’m a human being yet I consistently have more downtime than Blogger. The service actually came out on top last year in the same study, so Google’s got some pretty good longitudinal reliability to boast of now, too.

Honorable mentions go to WordPress and Typepad, both of which had a larger sum of downtime during the study but were still under a total of two hours. With WordPress down only nine minutes per month and Typepad down ten minutes, that’s still really good and I bet you would hardly notice the outage.

So do you see who ranked the most unreliable blogging service? That’s right: Tumblr. Tumblr had a median downtime of almost four hours per month with the single longest outage observed during the study at three hours. Three hours in Internet time is, like, it might as well just be a whole month. Have you seen how impatient people get when they try to load a page and it takes more than three seconds?

As you could probably glean from the above table, Pingdom ranked the blogging services in the following order, from best to worst:

Now carry on, my wayward bloggers, and enjoy the exquisite services offered to you by Blogger. However, if you happen to have already signed up for a Tumblr account, it’s not too late to jump ship and move on to greener pastures. Especially if you’re counting on Tumblr to help you get re-elected.