Today, while going through my list of feed subscriptions I noticed that some of the feeds where unavailable. I thought that maybe those particular blogs were hosted in the same place and the servers had gone down. Eventually the feeds were back up again. A few hours, I wanted to check out FeedBurner stats and noticed that FeedBurner was down, so our feed was down too. I realized that the same feeds that were not working before were down again, they were also using FeedBurner.

I was able to restore our feed in less than a minute, the way I have it setup generates a temporary redirect to the FeedBurner server so I just had to comment out a couple of lines in a configuration file. People always subscribe to a feed on my server, I just redirect them. Websites that let people subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed do not have this option and when the feed goes down they can only wait.
What happens if someday FeedBurner closes its doors? Lots of websites will immediately loose their subscribers, and slowly recover those who bother finding what the new URL for the feed is.

I am not bashing FeedBurner or complaining about their service. Right now FeedBurner is in beta and is a free service, they do not warranty that the service will be up 24/7. But a lot of people rely on them to support a vital part of their website, and I wonder how many other free services are used in this way.

I’m thinking of maybe writing my own software to track our feed traffic. That way I am responsible for the service and if it goes down it will be either my fault or my hosting service’s.
What do you think?