MySpace Bests Facebook on Uptime
MySpace has had better uptime than Facebook thus far in 2008, as MySpace has been offline for just 25 minutes, compared to 1 hour and 35 minutes for Facebook. But Yahoo!360 and LiveJournal have them both beat, according to a rating of uptime on social networks that has just been published by Pingdom. The monitoring found at least one instance in which a sopcial network's effort to transition to an application platform may be affecting performance:
Bebo’s downtime has increased significantly lately and has had by far the most downtime of the 14 social networks we monitored for this survey. More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook style. It could be putting more strain on Bebo’s systems than they anticipated.LinkedIn, which is widely used among business professionals, has had 4 hours of downtime in 2008. How does your favorite network fare? Check out the results of Pingdom's research.
Posted by Rich Miller 
February 26, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 07, 2007
Report: MySpace Buys PhotoBucket
Valleywag reports that MySpace has bought Photobucket, with the deal evolving from a dispute between the two huge social media sites in which MySpace briefly banned Photobucket content. While it lasted, the dispute apparently served as a stark reminder of just how much Photobucket relied upon MySpace.
And yes, infrastructure and bandwidth costs were a factor in the deal, according to Valleywag:
The popularity of Photobucket's free service among users of the News Corporation social network took the service to 17m unique visitors per month, according to Comscore, making it the web's most popular photo site, ahead of rivals such as Yahoo's Flickr. But the venture's rising bandwidth costs have eaten up most of its revenue growth, according to people close to the transaction.Some analysts predicted this deal, and see other opportunities for News Corp. to take advantage of the "MySpace economy" of sites that have built huge audiences by offering widgets, layouts and page-pimping tools. Could this be the first move in a "block them and buy them" strategy for MySpace?
Posted by Rich Miller May 07, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 04, 2007
Infrastructure Costs Nearly Killed MySpace
Was MySpace facing an infrastructure crisis prior to its acquisition by News Corp.? That's the claim being made by former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt, as summarized in a story at Advertising Age (link via Marketing Pilgrim).
Rosenblatt, who now heads domain advertising specialist Demand Media, was among the speakers at Paid Content's EconSM conference, and discussed the valuation of social media properties. The conventional wisdom (at least via 20/20 hindsight) has been that Rupert Murdoch got a sweet deal in buying MySpace for $580 million, since he was able to sign a $900 million ad deal with Google a few months later. But Rosenblatt suggests MySpace may not have been bargaining from a position of strength:
"MySpace was in an interesting stage of its development (when News Corp. acquired it)," he said. "It had a different type of capital structure and we weren't able to make the type of investments (necessary) for the infrastructure. Ultimately if we hadn't sold to News Corp., MySpace wouldn't be around today."Back in January we discussed an account of the growth of the MySpace infrastructure. While the site has faced constant data center challenges due to its rapid growth, the biggest budget buster was probably bandwidth, since MySpace has always swapped large amounts of video and image files, especially with YouTube and Photobucket.
Posted by Rich Miller May 04, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
January 17, 2007
MySpace and Its Growing Infrastructure
The incredible growth of MySpace has tested the infrastructure of the social networking site, which has constantly refreshed its equipment and technology to keep pace. Baseline has an interesting story that tracks the growth of MySpace and its infrastructure, based on an interview with Jim Benedetto, MySpace's vice president of technology, at a recent conference. Here's an interesting excerpt:
One problem is that MySpace is pushing Microsoft's Web technologies into territory that only Microsoft itself has begun to explore, Benedetto says. As of November, MySpace was exceeding the number of simultaneous connections supported by SQL Server, causing the software to crash. The specific circumstances that trigger one of these crashes occur only about once every three days, but it's still frequent enough to be annoying, according to Benedetto.Last summer we tracked the power outages at the Garland Building in Los Angeles that led to lengthy downtime for MySpace. Apparently in 2003 the site had problems when internal network traffic reached a volume that it was triggering anti-DDoS measures. As with the recent scalability study on eBay, there may well be information in the MySpace experience that can help others dealing with rapid audience growth.
Posted by Rich Miller January 17, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 10, 2006
MySpace Shifts to Peering For Video Delivery
When MySpace decided to use an in-house solution for delivering streaming video to its 75 million users, it was a blow to VitalStream, the content distribution network (CDN) and video delivery provider which relied on MySpace for a third of revenue. Within a week, VitalStream announced that it had been acquired by Internap for $217 million.
The winner in the MySpace technology shift was Equinix, whose peering capabilities were a major factor in the social networking hub's decision to lease space in the new Equinix data center in Los Angeles.
"MySpace's (video streaming) announcement was all about the value of peering in an Equinix facility," Peter Van Camp, CEO of Equinix, said in the company's recent analyst briefing. "MySpace wants to manage their own content distribution, so they are moving to more of a peering model in the way they deliver their content. By being in our data centers and next to all these other networks, they can get their content onto these downstream networks, which is really what the CDNs did for them."
Posted by Rich Miller November 10, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
October 09, 2006
MySpace Developing Own Streaming Technology
As it moves to leverage its audience's huge appetite for video, MySpace is developing its own streaming media infrastructure. This news comes via an earnings update from VitalStream, which currently provides streaming services for MySpace.
"MySpace, which is expected to constitute 31% of revenues in the third quarter, has conveyed to us its intent to develop its own in-house streaming capabilities," VitalStream Chairman and CEO Jack Waterman said in a press release. "Although MySpace continues to use certain VitalStream services, we expect to experience a significant reduction in revenue from MySpace commencing in the fourth quarter. Our third quarter gross margins were negatively impacted by MySpace-related business, consequently we expect gross margins to increase in the fourth quarter."
The comment about lower margins indicates that VitalStream was providing its streaming services to MySpace at a significant discount to its standard pricing. I suppose if you have 75 million users, it's a lot easier to negotiate a nice bulk discount. Partly because of those pricing issues, VitalStream expressed confidence that it can "replace and exceed our lower margin revenues from MySpace with growth from our core content delivery business and growth of our advertising solutions in both North America and Europe."
Posted by Rich Miller October 09, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
July 24, 2006
MySpace Outage Blamed on Data Center
Popular social networking hub MySpace was offline for hours last night and is blaming the downtime on a power outage in its Los Angeles data center. MySpace's Los Angeles equipment is housed at the new Equinix facility in El Segundo. But comments at GigaOm indicate that other customers of Equinix remained online last night. Digg also has equipment at El Segundo and experienced no problems, although it appears to serve most of its content from its San Francisco data center.
For those curious about the backend driving the MySpace site, there's an explainer at How Stuff Works.
Posted by Rich Miller July 24, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 17, 2006
MySpace Expands Data Center Infrastructure
The fast-growing social networking site MySpace is expanding its infrastructure, and has leased data center space in a brand new Equinix facility in Los Angeles. Once MySpace is fully installed, the agreement is expected to generate approximately $6 million in annual revenues for Equinix.
MySpace.com regularly ranks in the top 10 most visited sites on the Web with more than 75 million users, and is using the connectivity at Equinix's data centers to expand its high-performance infrastructure. At Equinix, MySpace has access to a critical mass of network service providers, providing flexibility in managing traffic surges and high-bandwidth features such as multimedia streaming.
"By offering a unique, network-rich environment with access to more than 200 networks, Equinix enables us to directly interconnect with the networks serving our end-users, providing a more streamlined path between content and users," said Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace. "This model not only enhances our site performance, but also enables MySpace to peer with end-user networks and exchange traffic in a way that circumvents the traditional method where content providers were required to pay for transit to reach end-users."
Posted by Rich Miller May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
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