Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr • Hacker News Board

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#21

Post by charliesome » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:03 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #7

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.

> 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.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#22

Post by smalter » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:03 AM UTC

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.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#23

Post by kmfrk » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:04 AM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #9

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.

It's ironic that this was just submitted to Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468974.

Aside from unexpected incidents (and limited offers), you'll be fine. But if something goes wrong, you don't want panic and misinformation to ensue.

It all depends on your kind of company, of course.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#24

Post by nodesocket » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:09 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #21

nodesocket wrote: post #7

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.

> 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.

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

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#25

Post by phzbOx » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:13 AM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #2

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?

"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."

From their about page:

"What is Tumblr? Millions of people sharing the things they do, find, love, think, or create."

Even if you can do more than a simple blog with tumblr, at its base it is a blogging platform. It's perfect for a startup that is busy doing lots of other things... if it wasn't for the fact that it's always down. I hope they'll someday add a "Always Up and running, no trouble" to their "30 reasons you'll love tumblr".

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#26

Post by flomo » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:17 AM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Startups: Don't Host Your Blog on Tumblr

#27

Post by zizee » Mon, Jan 16, 2012, 2:34 AM UTC

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).