So we have another update today from Robert Labatt’s WordPress Blog on ezboard.

What I found interesting in that is the comment about significant downtime on ezboard, given that when they were scheduled to have a purge of old and abandoned ezboards on April 3rd, they experienced two server crashes. For the technically minded, Labatt noted it was “a dead hard drive or something”…

Apparently, there hadn’t been any significant downtime for “over two months” as well.

If you take time to check through ezboard’s Server Status Reporting forum you’ll see regular reports of their servers being down, at least as far as their users are concerned.

So why the disparity? Well over on Wikipedia, I’ve been having a small battle with ezboard who appeared to want to treat it as a place to advertise globally for free. If you take a look at the history for the entry about ezboard, you’ll see the extent of the changes made. The entries from “Regimemachine” and 68.167.201.10 are from the same person who works for ezboard.

One such change was the removal of a claimed uptime of 99.95% by ezboard. It’s that claimed uptime percentage that is intriguing.

99.95% uptime over a year is equivalent to, what, 4 hours and 23 minutes downtime in a year. That’s not much and I’m sure that if you were to speak to ezboard’s users, they’d have a very different story to tell. I expect if you aggregated all the servers together, it might be possible to get to that 99.95% figure claimed as there would almost certainly be times when some servers might be up but all the rest were down.

Just goes to show that all those quotes about statistics may be right after all…