We’re approaching the end of 2012, and it’s been an exciting year for us at Pingdom and for our customers. We moved into a brand new office at the beginning of the year, saw record-breaking customer and sales numbers, a bunch of new colleagues joined us, and much more.
In short, because of you, our customer, it’s been a fantastic year. As a way to say thank you, and to take stock of where we are, we wanted to tell you some things about the year that has been.
You can click on the collage below to the right to see a larger version. It summarizes our year in photos.
Let’s kick off with some numbers
We’ll start with a sort of summary, highlighting some of the more important and interesting aspects of Pingdom’s year. In 2012:
- We saw a 62% increase in customers, to around 280,000.
- Monthly revenue increased by over 32%.
- We registered 64.5 million downtimes.
- We stored 106 billion monitoring results, which translates into 8,812,800,000 per month, 293,760,000 per day, 12,240,000 per hour, and 3,400 per second.
- Our customers were very active, logging in 1,878,953 times to the my.pingdom.com control panel. That’s just over 5,500 logins per day
- The uptime across all of Pingdom’s customers was 99.21%.
Creating the dream team
One of the more tangible developments over the past year for us at Pingdom was that the team has almost doubled, growing from 15 to 27, with quite a few more joining in the coming months. That’s the result of around 2,600 job applications from 30 countries around the world, and scores of job interviews.
Our aim is to become 40 employees during 2013, and we’ll grow as fast as we can find more talented colleagues. We feel we’re creating the best and most passionate team to be able to keep innovating, improving, and adding new products that will make the web faster and more reliable for our customers and everyone else.
A dream team needs a dream office to work in, and that’s pretty much what we have. We moved into our brand new facilities in March, which was very welcome because the previous office was bulging from the increasing number of employees. The old office was around 160 m2 (1,700 sq ft), and the new one is 660 m2 (7,100 sq ft) Also, the new office is more centrally located. Actually it’s right in the middle of the city, meaning we have better access to various types of conveniences, like transportation.
If you feel like you might fit right in at Pingdom, there’s still room for more passionate colleagues. Head over to jobb.pingdom.com for all the details (it’s in Swedish).
Recognition
While numbers can, in and of themselves, be a good indication of whether you’re doing the right thing, it’s clearly nice to also receive external recognition in other ways.
Awards
In November, Pingdom was awarded the prize “Gasell” by DI.se for being the company with the fastest financial growth during 2012 in its region of Sweden, the county of Västmanland.
The same month, Pingdom’s founder and CEO Sam Nurmi was given the prestigious recognition as male rising star of the year at the ceremony for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award. Credit for these achievements has to go to all of our customers who continue to love our service, as well as the uptime and performance geeks working here at Pingdom. Clearly, this shows that hard work and dedication to a cause will pay off.
Press and social media
We’ve also received quite a bit of recognition in the press and on social media. There were interviews with us and reviews of our service in print media as well as online.
On the social media networks we participate in, we kept in close touch with you, our customers, and the wider community. In 2012:
- We passed 17,000 fans on Facebook, representing a 95% increase.
- Over 113,000 people saw our most popular post on Facebook.
- We grew to more than 60,000 followers on Twitter, almost a 62% increase.
- We tweeted 5,000 times, which resulted in 10,000 retweets.
- We received 13,000 mentions.
Here are a select few tweets we especially appreciate from the past year:
The @pingdom API is awesome! Sweet and simple to integrate with. I am now able to monitor the monitor. #itsalongstory
— Brett Robichaud (@curioustechie) January 12, 2012
@dnavarrojr tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/HJLLgLN… shows some of the items taking a little extra delay. ^C — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) July 11, 2012
Added a Pingdom check to maximally alert me whenever developer.apple.com/wwdc/ does not contain “Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2011”. — Marco Arment (@marcoarment) March 27, 2012
If the AWS outage was like an earthquake, then Pingdom is the tsunami.
— Tobias Mollstam (@mollstam) March 15, 2012
@ethank Pingdom!
— Ryan Block (@ryan) March 1, 2012
Funny how a @pingdom message alerted me of a blown fuse; even before I noticed something myself. — Laurens de Vries (@thefrost) August 5, 2012
sometimes I randomly switch a server off, because the Pingdom notifications make me feel special — Tim Whitlock (@timwhitlock) March 28, 2012
Redesign made @boingboing home page load way faster. Says @beschizza: ~6 sec load before; ~3-4 sec after, acc. to pingdom.
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) September 17, 2012
Let us also mention our venture into video, as well as our presence on Dribbble and Pinterest.
Up- and downtime in 2012
The uptime across all of Pingdom’s customers was 99.21% in 2012. Here are some other numbers about the up- and downtime this year:
- We stored 106 billion monitoring results, which translates into 8,812,800,000 per month, 293,760,000 per day, 12,240,000 per hour, and 3,400 per second.
- The number of downtimes averaged 5.9 million per month.
- We registered a total of 64.5 million downtimes.
A downtime typically results in at least one alert being sent out. In 2012:
- 5 million alerts per month on average were issued.
- November was the busiest month with 6.6 million alerts sent.
Product development
This year, we focused on laying the groundwork for more innovation in the future. The single most important event during the year was the introduction of a completely new billing system. It’s not something that most of our customers really notice (and nor should they have to), but it gives us the flexibility and functionality we need to rapidly move forward with new services.
Another significant event in 2012 was that we migrated monitoring data from MySQL to MongoDB. In total, 250,000 accounts and 189 billion records were successfully migrated.
Brand new control panel
Another big event for us was the introduction of a brand new control panel, which we call my.pingdom.com. It offers a new and clean look, as well as more streamlined interface. You can now set up your checks with fewer steps, and better troubleshoot tests when something goes wrong. The feedback we’ve received on the new control panel has been great, and we’re already working on further tweaks and improvements.
Real User Monitoring and Transaction Monitor
More recently we kicked off a number of projects developing new services and features. There’s the Transaction Monitor beta, which makes it easy for our customers to set up monitoring of complex multi-step transactions, involving multiple scripts and web pages.
Another noteworthy project is the Real User Monitoring beta, which we’re now rapidly iterating into a soon-shipping service. It offers the perfect compliment to the synthetic monitoring we already offer. With Real User Monitoring, you can see how real users experience your site in real-time, showing how the speed varies between countries, devices, browsers, etc.
Both the Transaction Monitor and the Real User Monitoring betas are under active development and will ship in the early part of next year.
Deployments
To help us bring you more cool services we have worked hard internally on systems development and project management. This means increasing our use of version control, making sure that every bit of code now is subject to it, and builds and deployments are automated using Jenkins. When it comes to programming languages, we use what we feel is appropriate for each situation we face. Over the year we’ve used various languages and frameworks to help us to bring you the best solution possible.
Easy-to-use design
Product development does not only involve programming however, and we put a lot of effort into making our services easy to use by working with user interfaces. We’re showcasing some of this work on our Dribbble page, but one we’d like to especially point out is the brand new design for credit card input.
Events and travel
This year we attended a number of events with the Velocity events in the US and Europe being the main ones. It was, as always, a great opportunity to meet with customers and partners, as well as to see what the latest is in our industry.
We also went to China, to get a feel for the growing market in Asia. In addition to Asia, South America is a very exciting market, and we visited WHD.latinamerica in Brazil. There is so much happening in both these markets, and we look forward to introducing Pingdom to customers and partners there and beyond.
We also attended the W3C web performance workshop in California in November. That was a great experience for us, taking part of some of the latest developments in our industry, and give our input, as well.
All in all, Pingdom employees traveled almost 50,000km this year (more than the circumference of the Earth at the equator), something we definitely will beat in 2013.
Looking forward to 2013
2013 will be a busy year for Pingdom; there’s a lot in the pipeline. We want to be a leading company in the monitoring and performance industries, continuing our quest for making the web faster and more reliable. If you have any ideas for how we can accomplish that, or if you’d like to be a part of this quest, let us know, because we’re always open to hearing what you think. Together we can make a real impact on the way millions of users experience the Internet.
That about wrap things up for us for this year. Again, we thank you for making 2012 such a great year, and we look forward to continue working with you in 2013.
