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Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

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Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

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Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

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Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

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Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

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Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

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Chart showing how utterly Facebook has destroyed MySpace

MySpaceAnd now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.

To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.

Announcing Full Page Test 2.0: Test your site’s load time, find bottlenecks, get performance-boosting tips

The full announcement is over at the Pingdom blog, but we thought this was interesting enough to all of you that we included a shorter announcement here in Royal Pingdom as well.

Pingdom Tools for webmastersAfter more than six million performed tests, we thought it was time to give version 1.0 of our popular Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools a well-earned break. Actually, we’re giving it a full retirement, umbrella drinks and sunny beaches included. But don’t worry, version 2.0 of the Full Page Test is here to save the day! It’s still in beta, a few tweaks remain, but it’s fully functional so don’t hesitate to give it a spin.

This new Full Page Test is still completely free to use. It still helps you profile your website’s performance. But now it’s even better.

Huge Internet milestone just around the corner: 100 million registered .COM domain names

Dot comThe Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world

WindowsIn October, Windows 7 usage has for the first time surpassed Windows XP usage globally according to statistics from StatCounter. In other words, Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world.

This has been a long time coming. Windows XP has been at the top for eons (it launched 10 years ago, and once established, didn’t let go). Windows Vista never managed to threaten XP, so it wasn’t until Windows 7 came around that a shift really started to happen.

And that shift has happened fast. Windows 7 launched in October of 2009, then…

Why the talk about a 60% traffic loss to Google+ is (probably) alarmist nonsense

Google PlusLet’s see now. Where to begin? It’s been reported elsewhere that traffic to Google+ has dropped off by as much as 60% when compared to the huge boost the social network got in the days after it went public on September 20 (reportedly a 1,200% traffic boost). The basic problem now is that some are flinging this number around as some kind of proof that Google+ is doomed to fail and can’t retain users. So, time to for a reality check.

First of all, that Google+ would receive a huge but temporary boost around that time was a given. Remember this worldwide Google+ promo that Google ran on all its search pages, including Google.com?

Facebook now as big as the entire Internet was in 2004

FacebookAt the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).

Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.

Thought experiment: An Internet where all countries are equally developed (chart & numbers)

QuestionHave you ever asked yourself, “what if?”

Today, the global distribution of Internet users doesn’t really reflect how the population is distributed in the real world. Many countries (and whole regions) are either over- or underrepresented. Internet penetration varies wildly between countries.

So let’s do a thought experiment. What would the Internet look like if all countries were on an equal footing in terms of Internet penetration? We’ll take the United States as a baseline, with 78% of its population being Internet users, a level many industrialized countries either match or exceed.

The social networks of yesteryear. How the mighty have fallen

crowd

The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you want to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.

And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.

How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.

Pingdom in numbers: 37 billion site tests so far this year

PingdomOur server infrastructure has a lot of work to do, it’s quite a busy bee. When you monitor the uptime and response time of as many websites and servers on the Internet as we do, and do it on a continuous basis, the numbers quickly add up. Just for fun, we thought we’d share some of these numbers with you.

First a couple of year-to-date numbers for the Pingdom monitoring network.

How many millions will this add to Google+?

Google+It’s always interesting when Google decides to push something on their main property, the Google search page. Considering how ubiquitous Google is, this is such a power move.

What we mean is that no other company can cast its net this wide by just modifying its home page. We all use Google. It’s like your TV remote suddenly coming alive and telling you that yeah, you should check out that Google+ thing.

Microsoft’s web server is losing ground: IIS market share back to 1997 levels

Microsoft IISApache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

Who are the most interested in Google+? Not Americans

Google+Back in June, Google+ landed with splash in the social network swimming pool, spraying water right in Facebook’s eyes. Judging by the mostly positive buzz so far, it’s arguably one of Google’s most successful product launches ever.

We know there are plenty of early adopters and techies on Google+, mostly males (the term “sausage fest” has been thrown around). But where has Google+ captured the imagination of people the most? Where are people the most interested in this new social network?

How Microsoft is handicapping its own web browser

Internet ExplorerWe are in the middle of a new browser war, with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all fighting for Web and HTML 5 supremacy. Ok, that was a bit dramatic, but there is some seriously intense competition going on right now.

With that in mind, you’d expect all three companies to do their utmost to get their latest and greatest web browsers on as many computers as possible. Google is doing that with Chrome. Mozilla is doing that with Firefox.

Microsoft is NOT doing that with Internet Explorer. Big emphasis on “not.”

Huge milestone: Tumblr users have soon cranked out 10 BILLION posts

About Tumblr

The growth of the microblogging platform Tumblr has been nothing short of amazing. The increase in users and overall attention the service is getting is reminiscent of when Twitter took off. There are now almost 28 million blogs on Tumblr. A year ago there were seven million.

As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Tumblr users will soon have cranked out a whopping 10 billion posts. That’s a huge milestone for Tumblr. At the current rate of more than 37 million posts per day, this should happen in about a week.

A visual of the rise and fall of domain tasting

dot comRemember domain tasting? At its worst, millions of domain names were yanked up and dropped every day in this rather nasty scheme that abused the five-day “add grace period” for domain registrations. Things were bad, really bad. Back in 2006-2007, a full 94% of domain registrations were the result of domain tasting, only 6% were legitimate, permanent registrations.

Domain tasting was largely killed off by some policy changes from ICANN in 2008 (with a final death blow early in 2009), so we thought it was interesting to see this historical chart of .com domain names that actually showed visual evidence of the practice, and when it disappeared.

Google Chrome and South America, a love story

Google ChromeIn just a couple of years, Google Chrome has firmly established itself as a web browser to be reckoned with. Where once you spoke of Internet Explorer and Firefox as the two big ones, these days the duo has become a trio. The browser wars are back. Chrome has started to edge out Firefox in some countries, and as you will see in this article, there are actually countries where it’s already become number one.

This is where South America comes into the picture. Nowhere is Chrome more successful than in that part of the world.

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