We interrupt our Bosch posts for some breaking news. Yesterday the popular Blogging site provided by Google went down for about 20 hours! Many people are complaining about lost posts and comments in the outage. During a scheduled maintenance on Blogger’s servers, there was some corruption in the data. This caused Blogger to become unstable, they had to restore their servers from a previous backup, which is why some data may have been lost in all the shuffle.
On Blogger your data is not your own. You can download your posts and comments using a couple different tools, but you do not have access to your database. If Blogger decided tomorrow that it didn’t want to host your blog anymore, it could just delete it. If there was a catastrophe at Blogger and their server crashed, they do not HAVE to restore your data. You don’t pay for the hosting, so you have no ground to stand on if something happens to your data. If you are serious about blogging, you aren’t going to want to trust someone else to care as much about your data as you do.
If you are on Blogger, I either recommend switching over to a self hosted WordPress installation (which will run you about $10/month), or at least making sure you are backing up your posts and comments on a regular basis. So the real question becomes… I wonder if Facebook & Twitter’s traffic increased during the outage. All those bloggers with no where to write….
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Wow! Now if that is not reason to switch to WordPress…