Techcrunch reports that Digg.com suffered at least two hours of downtime yesterday. Today, Digg’s response was extremely sluggish and according to my browser (see screenshot on the right), the bottleneck was a server called hitbox.com, which seems to belong to WebSideStory, a company that provides visitor analytics among other services.

I’m currently using Google’s Analytics service to analyze user traffic on various sites, am experimenting with using Photobucket to serve up the images on this blog and rely on Snap.com to give link previews.

More and more blogs and sites are relying on these kind of backend mash-ups. Digg’s problem with their analytics provider highlights the risk of outsourcing too many features of a business critical site to outside parties.

ps. When I was trying to find the Techcrunch post regarding Digg, I was held up by… you guessed it: The Google Analytics server.

Update: In an interview on TalkCrunch, the Digg team gives an obvious explanation to outsourcing their analytics. Because their business model relies on ads, their customers have to get a third party to tell them how much traffic the site actually gets.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Technology, The Web as a platform, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.