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A Look At The Uptime Of 50 Popular APIs

Robin Wauters

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Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, March 25th, 2011
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APIs are like websites: they are available most of the time, but unfortunately not all the time.

Website and application performance monitoring startup WatchMouse monitored the uptime of 50 of the most popular APIs (as ranked by ProgrammableWeb) for a month to see which are the most reliable – and which ones are rather flaky.

WatchMouse, which also publishes API statuses in real time at API-Status.com, found that ten of them performed without a single hitch between February 16th to March 17th, including goo.gl, Quora, eBay, Google Maps and Basecamp.

A number of APIs, namely those from Digg, GeoNames, Gowalla, Posterous and Eventful performed rather poorly, but ailing Myspace takes the cake in terms of unreliability.

Needless to say, a lot of websites and applications rely on APIs for their own businesses, so uptime is important to avoid that nasty domino effect to kick in.

The methodology for testing the sites for this particular report includes one simple API call plus check for a valid result, which means that it’s not exactly an in-depth functional test of the full APIs, but could still be used to evaluate whether one should rely on certain APIs for business purposes. The full report is available here.

The API checks were performed every 5 minutes from the 56 WatchMouse monitoring stations worldwide. Errors are used to count towards the percentage of availability or uptime for each of the sites.

Crunchbase

Company: WatchMouse
Website: watchmouse.com
Launch Date: February 20, 2002

Founded in February 2002, WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse product tests the behaviour and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes 50 worldwide remote monitoring stations and a global network of checkpoints in 35 countries. WatchMouse offers web based solutions to monitor the performance and security of sites by simulating regular visits from its monitoring network. WatchMouse tells you if visitors can reach your site, if...

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