

Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr - PStamatiou
http://blog.picplum.com/startups-dont-host-your-blog-on-tumblr/

======
abalone
Ummm.... they're hosting on HEROKU?

In 2011, Tumblr was down for 42 hours.

In 2011, Heroku was down for _76_ hours in one incident alone.

And that's all before you get to the hubris of the assumption that your custom
coded setup will perform better. A more sensible argument would be to move to
a host with a better proven uptime record, such as Blogger (nearly 100%).

Sources: [http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-
downti...](http://allthingsd.com/20111215/tumblr-had-42-hours-of-downtime-
in-2011-and-thats-an-improvement/) <https://status.heroku.com/incident/151>

~~~
PStamatiou
No biggie, I can temporary move our blog to another host with a simple DNS
change and pulling the static site from our repo. Ah, the power of jekyll!

~~~
theli0nheart
If you're using Jekyll, why not just host with S3/Cloudfront?

~~~
PStamatiou
I had thought about it but

\- I wanted to use Sinatra to 301 old tumblr urls

\- Call me weird but I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing
you can do with S3 root object (when I checked a few months ago)

\- something I can't remember. maybe it was cf edge server time to update when
altering updates.

~~~
k7d
> I loathe seeing *.html in urls and that's the only thing you can do with S3
> root object

You can configure name of index file, and that will be displayed for requests
against root URL and subdirectories (such as blog posts) as well. No need for
having .html in URLs.

The only problem I've encountered with S3 web hosting is that it does not let
you host naked domains.

~~~
pilom
Naked domains as in "example.com" without the www? Just name your bucket
without the www and it will work. You can then do a javascript redirect from a
simple index page at www.example.com (google has said that they now follow
javascript redirects. My play example "<http://whitewatersearch.com>

------
smalter
Like most things, choosing where to host your company blog is a strategic
choice that can't be boiled down to a categorical.

tumblr has a really amazing community. tumblr's downtime is a fact. The
question is, does the community outweigh the downtime?

I think you make this decision based on the demographics of the tumblr
community vis-a-vis your users / customers. And tumblr isn't just 14 year old
girls -- there's a bunch of tech people on it (although that may be more NYC
tech).

In the comments, people have mentioned the simple fact that you can have both
a self-hosted company blog and a company tumblr, much like most companies have
a company blog and a company twitter. I agree, although simply feeding content
from the blog into the tumblr of course doesn't make best use of tumblr as a
platform.

My startup's blog is on tumblr (<http://blog.idonethis.com>) and we get about
1/5 of the referral traffic of twitter and facebook from tumblr. (We have
nearly 1k followers on tumblr versus 1.6k twitter followers and 2k facebook
likes.) In other words, it's our 3rd largest source of referral traffic from
social media.

~~~
thesethings
Well put. I do marketing work on a few projects that have commercial blogs. In
mose cases, we're able to get 1K+ Tumblr followers in < 3 months (not counting
"regular" RSS subscribers). (And none of the projects are famous/have famous
founders/services/products) To get the same amount of regular RSS subscribers
is much more difficult.

Tumblr is comparable to Twitter in that it's a common _place_ to meet your
readers/customers. Unlike a self-hosted blog, you don't have to ask visitors
to leave where they are to visit you. So you're likely to get a bit more foot
traffic/interaction, not to mention people passing it on/sharing it out (via
reblogs).

Now if you're an already established service/otherwise famous, you might have
no problem getting people to check you out. But even then, Tumblr has its
benefits.

I don't think the choice is necessarily all or nothing between self-hosted or
Tumblr. Many companies with "real" blogs also have Tumblrs. In many cases
companies have _multiple_ Tumblrs. (Not unlike Twitter, it's becoming common
to have a separate Tumblr for different events/products/branches/divisions.
IBM has at least 3. NBC has at least 4...)

I won't disagree that Tumblr has horrible performance issues. But it's still
worth it. Twitter 3 years ago had bad performance issues, but it was/is still
definitely investing in. No social site is forever, but they're great tools as
long as you're aware of costs + benefits.

------
citricsquid
A mistake people seem to make is assuming Tumblr is a blogging platform akin
to Wordpress.com, it isn't, it's a different beast entirely. The majority of
Tumblr is the "community" of ~teenagers sharing pictures and videos and posts,
Tumblr revolves around the dashboard not individual blogs. Sure you can host
your company blog there, but do tumblr _care_ about the uptime of that vs. the
uptime of their dashboard?

~~~
flomo
There is enough porn on Tumblr that I would assume it's being blocked by many
corporate firewalls. (Not to mention blanket bans on social networking sites.)
Probably not a place I would put marketing material.

~~~
Leynos
It's certainly blocked at my workplace.

~~~
zizee
But that's just blogs on the tumblr domain. If it is on a subdomain I'd
imagine it's not blocked.

------
iamdave
_Akshay noticed I was so annoyed with Tumblr that he suggested I write this
post detailing our move and urging other startups to do the same._

As much as this is a very staunch gesture, I think it's a very valid one.
Tumblr has a huge, active, and connected community. It can be a great entry
point for niche startups to find users and build an audience, but the
performance and stability just does not cut the mustard.

I greatly want tumblr to succeed, their platform is very fresh, the theme
garden model they have fits their mold perfectly (although the premium
marketplace seems to be extremely esoteric) but I also hope this suggestion
for startups to choose an alternative platform kicks tumblr in some sort of
direction to improve the QoS.

~~~
kmfrk
It is still possible to create a Tumblr blog that pulls the RSS from your
site, though. You can just tell it to only display the URL and title so you
don't get an SEO mess.

Not perfect, of course, but it still gives you a slight chance to use Tumblr's
amazing sharing platform.

~~~
iamdave
You are correct. That's actually one of my favorite features tumblr has, it
reminds me much of a site I used back in the 2000's called SideBlog. It worked
exactly the same way, drop in a line of javascript and it pulled in your posts
and you could design everything around it.

This kind of reinforces my earlier commentary, tumblr has some great features
and awesome integration, but their performance and reliability always make me
steer clear when needing to put up a blog for a client.

------
alexwolfe
A Tumblr blog may not be the best solution but spending that many resources on
a blog (especially one not featured in the main navigation) is usually out of
the question for most startups.

For most startups the amount of time invested for a custom Jekyll setup and a
downtime script could be replaced with a new feature or a better product/home
page.

I think its important for startups not to spend too much time blogging unless
they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly support the
product/company. Make the product better first. If your blog host (Tumblr)
isn't stable enough, wordpress it and be done with it.

~~~
apsurd
HN'ers have a hard enough time accepting:

    
    
       'more features' != 'more marketshare'
    

I would caution this making sure to note "it depends on the startup". If your
industry pays attention to blogs it's very much worth devoting large amounts
of effort to capturing this attention. I as much as the next programmer need
the _focus on marketing_ mantra pounded into my head time and time again.

See 37signals blog, seomoz blog, and every piece of advice patio11 has ever
written.

~~~
alexwolfe
I certainly don't have a hard time with that. Perhaps reread the comment I
left.

"unless they feel it will provide them some decent traffic and strongly
support the product/company"

Not sure you added anything to my previous comment.

------
huhtenberg
Strangely enough I find that I am more inclined to read company's blog if it
is visibly hosted on a dedicated blog site, Tumblr and Posterious included.
Based on this observation I did a bit of testing of <product>.tumblr.com vs
blog.<product>.com and former generated more foot traffic from Twitter link
drops. Haven't tried www.<product>.com/blog though, it might well outperform
both options.

------
shortformblog
I run a news site on Tumblr and I can tell you my downtime problems are
nowhere near as bad as this site suggests they are. In the past three months I
can remember only one major bout of downtime, and I'm on the site most of the
day every day.

And in the case that downtime is as bad as it seems, I suggest you guys use
CloudFlare, which will at least keep a cached version of your site online even
during downtime issues.

Tumblr is way more about community than mission-critical uptime. If you treat
it like mission-critical uptime, you're going to be disappointed. If you're
trying to reach an audience for your application — which, honestly, should be
more important with a staff blog — Tumblr is a great bet.

------
zizee
Another problem with hosting with Tumblr is that you can't host the blog on
the same domain as your app. The usual solution is to host the blog at
blog.example.com. The problem with this is that subdomains are treated by
google as a separate domain, so any google juice flowing to your blog does not
help your main domain. With SEO, one of the most important things is incoming
links and if you split your incoming links across multiple domains, the sum is
actually less than the whole. The best solution is to host your blog in a
subfolder on your main domain (e.g. example.com/blog).

~~~
chlee
Are there blog hosting services that one can use in a subfolder? AFAIK, both
tumblr and posterous only supports subdomains but not folders.

~~~
zizee
Unfortunately not. I don't think this is actually possible as I don't think
you can have a subfolder of a site hosted elsewhere (not in a 'performant'
manner at least).

The only solution that I know of is to host it all on the one box which makes
it trick if you want to use Heroku to host your app.

I am currently wrestling with this problem as I want to host a new app on
Heroku, but have the marketing side of the site powered by wordpress to take
advantage of things like third party themes. The app will also generate
linkable content, so it is important to me to have it on the same domain, but
there seems to be no way to achieve what I want to do with heroku :-(

So annoying!

~~~
SingAlong
Did you try the Cedar stack?

~~~
zizee
Well, you can host PHP on a cedar stack, and I have successfully deployed
wordpress to heroku, so that is _very_ cool.

It was actually really easy with this: <https://github.com/mhoofman/wordpress-
heroku>

But unfortuently, to the best of my knowledge, you can't host both PHP at the
same time as Rails.

If anyone know otherwise I would love to hear!

~~~
SingAlong
I've read about people who use workarounds on the Cedar stack for different
purposes. Did you think about running two different heroku instances for the
same app? With both on instances on Cedar stack, one instance can be running
the rails part while the other instance runs the php.

I just read the DotCloud docs and they do a lot of stuff including php and
ruby, you might want to check them out to see if they run both in the same
instance.

~~~
zizee
Interesting. I'll check out the ability to run two different heroku instances
for the same app to see if that can help. If you could point me to any
literature on the subject it would be very much appreciated.

I'll ckeckout DotCloud as well. Thanks for the heads up!

edit: added request for more info

------
nodesocket
We (NodeSocket) are on Posterous; and so far so good. Love the fact that if a
post makes the HN front page, we don't have to worry about scaling or
downtime. Also, it was super easy to select a theme and modify some basic CSS
rules to match our branding and website. Finally, they have some nice nerdy
features as well; GitHub Gists and Vimeos automatically converted from a URL
to embed.

~~~
charliesome
> _Love the fact that if a post makes the HN front page, we don't have to
> worry about scaling or downtime._

If you have to worry about scaling or downtime if a blog post hits HN's front
page, then I'm afraid that you screwed up _really bad_ somewhere.

Any server should be able to handle that traffic.

~~~
nodesocket
See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3451893>, scaling Wordpress isn't
exactly easy, when running on shared hosting.

------
callmeed
Since when is a startup's corporate blog mission-critical?

PicPlum's recent blog posts seem to be pretty run-of-the mill ... press
mentions, tips, new features, etc. Nothing that (a) would hurt the company if
the blog was down or (b) you couldn't simply use your company Facebook page
for.

~~~
PStamatiou
Agreed, we didn't have anything too interesting in recent past but we're going
to start ramping that up. Especially after checking out rand fishkin's
presentation about inbound marketing.

~~~
jamesjyu
+1,000,000 to rand's presentation. Here's the link in case you missed it:
[http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-
marke...](http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-
for-startups/)

We are big believers in making quality content at Parse as well. Interruption
marketing is annoying and not nearly as effective.

Given that, it's pretty crucial for our blog to be up as well. (we're also on
jekyll, hosted on our own servers)

------
ggwicz
I don't see the problem with sticking with Tumblr. What most of the trouble
with my Tumblr-powered sites seems to be is the use of Tumblr's Static Media
uploader (<http://www.tumblr.com/themes/upload_static_file>) which is used for
js files, external css, images, etc.

Sites (in my experience!) with a lot of these links have _way_ more loading
problems. Simple sites that rely more on markup and CSS3 than images and a lot
of JavaScript have only dropped out a few times in my experience.

Just my two cents, maybe somebody can comment and verify this.

------
leftnode
It does depress me somewhat when I see people writing incredibly insightful or
great blog posts on another company's blogging platform. I'd live in constant
worry the company could fold up shop one day and your posts would be gone
(unless you kept local copies manually).

It's your writing, if it is good and insightful, write it on a server you have
control over.

~~~
CJefferson
I used to have a blog on my personal domain (not saying it was incredibly
insightful), and I got tired of updating wordpress. One day the wordpress
update failed, and I just took down the blog and now it is gone.

My livejournal blog however, which I set up over 10 years ago (and haven't
updated in 7 years) is still there in it's embarassing completeness.

------
airlocksoftware
Weird. I can't remember ever having trouble loading a tumblr blog.

I wonder what accounts for our different experiences?

~~~
littledude
maybe it's because of the location of the servers? they seem to be west coast,
i'm east coast and can't remember the last time i had trouble loading a tumblr
blog

------
Legion
So, in the last week or so of reading Hacker News, I've been told:

    
    
      * Don't blog on Google+
      * Don't blog on Tumblr
    

Before I start blogging, are there any others I should know about?

~~~
ohashi
I think ultimately you will see complaints against almost every service and
you will be left with one choice. Host your own. And then that has its own
shortcomings. So we can conclude that everything has risks no matter what.
It's up to you to assess and decide which risks you can tolerate.

------
sunsu
I use google plus along with a simple tool I made for a really simple blog
that's hosted on my domain: <https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify>

------
kjackson
Is your price really 50 cents per print plus shipping?

Costco.com will print for 12 cents per print and free shipping, are you guys
going to be able to be competitive against them?

~~~
PStamatiou
Picplum is focusing on quality rather than optimizing on price. Our prints are
considerably higher quality with premium archival lustre paper (much thicker),
better packaging-- We're selling an experience not cheap prints with an
ecommerce add-to-cart-then-select-sizes experience.

Happy to report that price has not been an issue and we have many happy return
customers. Try it out and let us know what you think! Each new account has $5
in credits.

------
mvkel
I'll take 99.8% uptime over managing an entire blog infrastructure.

~~~
trickjarrett
Out of genuine curiosity, what percent of uptime would be worth managing your
own infrastructure?

~~~
tobtoh
I don't think it's quite a simply answer like X% uptime.

A lot of the decision is the 'quality' of the downtime. For example:

* Is it generally stable, but only going down in peak load situations (obviously no good if you know peak load occurs when you are doing critical new product release/sales etc, but may be okay if you peak load corresponds to non-critical events).

* How long is the outages? If it goes down for 1 minute each day, that may be more acceptable compared to '100%' uptime except one day when it goes out for 365 minutes.

All of that affects the impact that the downtime has on your venture - it's
quite possible you might have 'poor' uptime stats, but it has zero effect on
your business, in which case the cost/effort savings from using a 'poorer
uptime' hosted service may be worth it.

~~~
mvkel
Well put. I echo your sentiments entirely. No point in bending over backwards
for 99.999% uptime when it has zero effect on one's business.

Priorities...

------
Sukotto

       Heroku-hosted custom Jekyll setup
    

I thought Heroku only allowed dynamically-generated content (with static
assets hosted elsewhere)

But the whole point of Jekyll is that it generates a static site.

What am I missing? (seriously)

I thought a starter Heroku account might work well for a side project I have
cooking... Coincidentally, I was reading about Jekyll as something fun to try.
Combining both of them would be pretty cool.

~~~
philwelch
Heroku doesn't actively prevent you from hosting a static site. Yeah, heavy
assets like images and video should be hosted elsewhere, but with HTML and
stuff it's fine to just throw it in a static Git repo and use Heroku.

~~~
zizee
The main thing that will stop you is the limit on the "slug size", which is
100mb. This is heaps for static text like html, but if your blog is image
intensive you could hit the wall after a while. Video would push you over
super quick.

------
paul9290
I'm in the amidst of launching my start-up CodePupil.com .

What I dig about Tumblr is how fast Google indexes posts from there due to
it's popularity.

Thus, if your looking to HELP get your start-up's name listed in Google fairly
quikcly, then a Tumblr or Posterous would be best to use. I posted a Tumblr
"About us," yesterday and Google indexed it eight hours later.

------
resnamen
Somewhat related gripe: does anybody like the admin UI in Tumblr? It seems
like important settings are scattered all over the place. I don't understand
why the site view and admin views are two discrete locations, either. Has the
core service received much love since David Karp's first cut?

------
iamclovin
We recently moved our dev blog (dev.anideo.com) to jekyll + github pages as
well, not because of problems with uptime but because gist support is a major
pita on Tumblr and we primarily use our blog to post code snippets.

------
liefe
So what is a generally accepted blog back-end if you're self hosting?

------
danberger
Another reason to not user Tumblr is David Karp's [the founder's] attitude.
[http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-
tell...](http://getoffmyinternets.net/2011/05/31/david-karp-will-tell-you-how-
to-run-a-company/)

------
bountie
The problem with Tumblr as a blog is that it's not easy to do straightforward
comments

------
akuchlous
has anybody tried to crawl tumblr outside of goog?

