[UPDATE 17:45 HK time, 11 May: Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic Inc., the company behind WordPress.com, just wrote a comment to my post here that the down-time of a few hours ago was due to a fire in a data center. This downtime in the middle of the day in Asia for long periods of time is, in my experience, rare. And when it does happen, like today, it seems usually due to a real disaster--which could befall any company or data center. Hope there's not too much damage to the data center and I wish WordPress.com well.]
I love WordPress.com. I think it’s the best platform around to blog on, and it’s free to boot. But for these of us in Asia there are two big “flies in the ointment”:
REASON 1: Down-time in the middle of our day. After not having blogged for a week, I attempted to check my blog today, mid-day Sunday, in the middle of a 3-day weekend. But WordPress was down for maintenance for at least 90 minutes (from at least 11:09am Hong Kong time). This is a real downer for those of us with blogs (and blog readers) living in Asia. Why not have a few sets of servers, so maintenance time can “follow the sun” and always happen in the middle of the night? North American SaaS providers, like WordPress, who want large loyal global market customer bases need to pay attention here (as I’ve written about before). While there is no SLA (service level agreement) that guarantees WordPress will be up in the middle of the day, there’s an implicit social contact I have with my blog readers that I’ll choose a good blog hoster that won’t regularly go down in the middle of the day–which I violate cuz of WordPress.com.
REASON 2: You can’t blog from China and the 300 million internet users in China can’t read your blog. Because WordPress is blocked in China. WordPress and other serious global SaaS brands need to proactively figure out a way to co-locate servers in China (with proper ICP license), or become totally irrelevant in the largest market in the world.
Just to clarify on the maintenance point. It was “unplanned” in that there was a major fire at one of our datacenters and to keep blog data safe we turned off new posts for a period of time.
Hi Matt,
Sorry to hear about the fire. Those kind of disasters are a nightmare. This downtime today, then, falls into one of those “small fraction of 1 percent due to real disasters” which are pretty much would bring down any normal operation. I’ll make an update note in my post to clarify.
-Dan