Kudos to YouTube for creating a phenomenal consumer video site. It’s still quite surprising, though, that YouTube keeps going down for maintenance during prime viewing hours. Their current downtime (as of 10pm PST) appears to be less serious, but has still killed most administration functionality.

Google is reknowned for its network infrastructure, and there was some speculation GOOG’s acquisition of YouTube was necessary in part because YouTube was choking on its own traffic volume. While YouTube has put a very prominent “powered by Google” graphic on their site, apparently the infrastructure renovation still has a ways to go.

Spotty uptime is fine for a free, consumer service. For reliable e-commerce video hosting, consider SilverDock.

Filed under: YouTube, effective online video, outage