How Often is Online Storage Offline?

It's 10 minutes before your meeting. You stashed that copy of your 30MB PowerPoint you worked on at home to your online storage service. Now you're trying to retrieve it. Bad news: Your virtual vault is down and your PowerPoint doc locked away for who knows how long.

Uptime matters to everyone, whether you're Citibank or an online storage service. As more of our work moves online, uptime is increasingly important. That's why I was particularly interested when uptime monitoring service Pingdom released a study detailing the reliability of 16 online storage services including MegaUpload, SendSpace, YouSendIt, and DropSend.

Pingdom tested the uptime of these services over a three-month period. It found that uptime varied widely. Some services had only brief outages, such as MailBigFile.com, which was down only 5 minutes during that span. Compare that to MyTempDir.com, which was down 66 hours over the three-month time period. The storage sites that scored the worst along with MyTempDir.com were QuickSharing.com and BigUpload.com, according to Pingdom. The winners were MailBigFile.com, Gigasize.com, and SendThisFile.com.

If you don't recognize the names of these online storage services, you aren't alone. Many of these sites surveyed are very small. Missing from Pingdom's list of survey candidates is popular services such as XDrive, Streamload Mediamax, and Box.net.

Focusing on who was tested may be missing the point, however. Uptime is now becoming an increasingly important in a Web 2.0 world where our primary e-mail accounts are now GMail or Yahoo Mail and all our photos are stored on Flickr. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to my bank's Website only to find access to my account is "temporarily unavailable."

The demand for 24/7 online access raises the bar for online companies. Now, not only do they need to have a great online service or application, it needs to be reliable -- and that usually means available anytime.

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