There’s a scary thing happening these days in the professional blogging world. It seems that the message board trolls, you know, the ones who have spent years yelling like jerks on message boards all over the Internet, have figured out that they can b…

A Word of Warning: this post is written late on a Wednesday night after I have come home fully loaded from a night going deaf watching a Motley Crue concert - Yup, the angst of adolesence was soothed by an obsession with the Crue … so forgive…

If the network owners don’t want to chip in a few hundred bucks just to get that 100% uptime, then it’s also an issue of trust. A downtime of 0.5% is still about 3.5 hours a month.

Sorry to post this off-topic, but I see no way to contact you on this page.

Can we ask you to add us to you list of blog networks ?

The post was really just acknowledging there is an issue (like anybody didn’t know) and saying we’re working on it, and quickly.

Our downtime this month has been around half a percent. We are approaching capacity in our busiest times. Of course half a percent is more downtime than we want to have and we’ll work to decrease it further - but it’s not like we’re constantly down.

We’re not at a stage where we’re having serious conversations about ‘do we pay our bloggers or do we upgrade the server’ - the way it’s being reported sounds like we’re in dire straights. We will always pay our bloggers because the system we have in place ensures that what they get paid is in proportion to the income coming in.

The conversations we have are more like - ‘lets get our bloggers paid up and then when we see what’s left or what we need to find from our own pockets we’ll buy a new server’. It’s more about timing and cash flow than anything else.

Jeremy reported the downtime issue because part of b5’s journey is to share what we’re learning along the way - we do this because we believe that blogging is about sharing knowledge and we hope in doing so we and other learn more about starting a blog network. The problem with doing this is that everytime we do share what we’re learning and the experiences that we have - we get swooped upon by others wanting to point out the insufficiencies we have (which we’re pretty open about anyway). While we want to be transparent and open about what we’re learning I have to say that recent experience makes me wonder what the point is.

Today is a good day for learning from others mistakes. Seems b5 media have some problems with keeping their network up. Now as I mentioned the other day when choosing a host you can’t afford downtime, downtime hurts business, in this case for B5 mai…