All servers have to eventually be re-booted. Does Flickr use server clusters which offer literally no downtime for your photos, or will they occasionally be unavailable? Thank you EDIT: I'm not asking about network outages or disasters. Under normal conditions do they use clusters with "100% uptime?" EDIT #2: I found an answer. They try to use clustered servers, but have had some "famous" downtime. Flakey Flickr goes down. Again "... But it turns out that that was wrong and the ill-paired failure of two different drives within an hour of each other and some not-as-advertised raid controller flakiness in one of the database masters meant that we had to take the site down to reconfigure. Since it is down, we are running some power maintenance as well and plugging various servers into other slots. Should be back up well before 8pm pacific." -source When using Flickr do you feel confident your photos will be seen by your visitors?
yes. flickr is a professional site, and people pay for that service. Except for natural disasters, acts of God or DDoS attacks, I imagine they will continue to be there offering you premiere service as long as you pay for it. If I had to bet on any single photo-hosting service for uptime, it would be them. Oh, and they're owned by Yahoo as well, if that helps lay your worries at ease
I pull various images from flickr using RSS, and YES, they do go down "for maintenance" occasionally. No big deal. I'm very happy with their FREE service: http://flickr.com/photos/kerosene
the general rule is: Unix servers have an average uptime of 500 days Linux servers have an average uptime of 300 days Windows servers have an average uptime of 30 days Maybe if you told us what you needed we could better lay your worries to rest or suggest something that would apply better to your situation. If I was running a site I'd expect Flickr to be up more than my website.
Thanks, for the good advice. I don't use Flickr yet, so I was mainly interested in checking if they are "trusted". Using them for convenience is great (tons of people do); Any truly important project should probably keep the photos and graphics on the same server as the website.
true, and the rule with hosting is this: you get what you pay for. if you're looking for a rock solid web host with great abilities and very good uptime, I'd go for GoDaddy. The only 2 hosts I know of that I'd go with no questions asked are GoDaddy and MediaTemple (for really big sites)
All individual servers have downtime. Some high-end clustered hosting promises 100.00% uptime unless there is a major data center or network outage. Flickr tries for 100% uptime (clustered network), but they had some trouble with their network more than once.