I understand the value that Tumblr offers to its community, however there’s one thing they are particularly horrible at: uptime. I spend a ton of time reading blog posts as sources of inspiration for my own content. In particular, I spend a bunch of time browsing through the posts published on Hacker News. Yet all too often I end up clicking through to a page that doesn’t load. 99 percent of the time it’s because the site is hosted on Tumblr.

Take this post by Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer. I clicked through to it and it didn’t work after literally 20 attempts. Why? It’s hosted by Tumblr. Ironically he has an ad on the side for the hosting company I use: MediaTemple.

Keep in mind, MediaTemple also has it’s fair share of problems. All the popular blogs I’ve tracked have experienced down time as a result of hosting on MediaTemple’s Grid Service. However I was able to scale AllFacebook to over 40,000 people a day using the following steps:

1. Sign up for MediaTemple DV (or another reliable hosting provider like Linode, etc)
2. Install Wordpress
3. Add the WP-Super Cache plugin

You are now done. If you are experiencing downtime with this configuration then congratulations, you have officially reached the big league. One quick disclaimer: I am paying $100 a month for my dedicated-virtual server with 1 GB of memory, yet I’m also hosting 10 sites on it. You can get the same level of memory with Linode for only $39.95 per month but then you need to configure your server which is a pain in the ass.

If you’d prefer a free route, I seriously suggest taking a look at Wordpress.com.