Synthetic Monitoring

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

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

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

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

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

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the Web

Blogging services

Blogging services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for Wordpress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr and Posterous. There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, many of them residing on these services.

One big bonus of using a blogging service is that they take much of the pain away from having a blog since they handle the hosting for its users and everything is already set up. Once you publish, the responsibility for keeping that content available online rests firmly on the shoulders of the blogging service.

With that in mind, we decided to test five of today’s most popular blogging services to see how reliable they actually are.

The most popular web servers for REST APIs

Web server softwareRESTful APIs have become increasingly popular both among web services and developers and are easy to serve up with the same software used for regular web pages. In May of 2010, 74% of web APIs used REST as their protocol.

When setting up servers for a REST API it can make sense to use a web server software that is a bit more lightweight than what you’d use for a full-blown website. The gains are, at least in theory, that each API server that way could handle more requests since it would be less taxing on system resources.

But is that what actually happens, or do most web services just put up an Apache server, same as they would do for a regular website?

Things Nokia should be getting more credit for

NokiaNokia is the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones. Lately the company has had its thunder stolen by Apple’s iPhone and the plethora of Android devices flooding the market, especially in the fast-growing smartphone market.

In other words, Nokia is in a bit of trouble. However, considering how much flack the company has been getting lately in the tech press, we thought it would be nice to look back and give Nokia some credit for what they have accomplished in the past. Because it’s a past filled to the brim with innovation.

The incredible growth of supercomputing performance, 1995 – 2010

The Jaguar supercomputer

Computer hardware has become infinitely more powerful through the years, a trend that has allowed computer makers to push the performance to levels we almost thought were impossible just a decade earlier.

The exponential growth of computing performance is very noticeable when you examine how the performance of the world’s most powerful computer systems, the supercomputers, has changed over time.

Mobile OS usage splits the world (chart)

Worldwide mobile OS usage

Where do you think Apple’s iPhone is the most popular? Where does Nokia’s Symbian phones dominate? How is it going for Android in different parts of the world? What about Blackberry?

We’re going to answer all of those questions and more in this article, which will closely examine mobile OS usage across the world.

Awesome visualizations of internet and web tech

VisualizationText and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.

This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.

Enjoy!

Mobile web usage highest in Asia and Africa

Mobile webWe increasingly access the Web from our mobile phones, especially now that the rise of smartphones is making it easier than ever to get a decent web experience on the small screen.

However, the highest share of mobile web usage isn’t in the most developed nations, but rather in the developing nations of the world.

When software giants trample the little guys

Godzilla“What if Google does it?”

That has to be a pretty common question among startups when they discuss their business plans. Gaining Google as a sudden competitor is usually not good news.

The problem is, no matter how brilliant your software or service may be, there’s always a cloud on the horizon. There are elephants out there, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and now also Facebook, and those elephants can come crashing into your glass house at any time. All they need to do is release a similar product.

It happens all the time.

China’s long climb to the supercomputing top

ChinaChina just officially climbed to the top position in the supercomputer performance race. You may have read that the country now has the fastest, and also the third fastest, supercomputer in the world.

But this was no overnight success. It’s been a long race for China to get there. Back in the 90s, China’s presence in the supercomputer top 500 was almost non-existent, so most of this progress has happened in the last decade.

The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts)

Internet connection speed

How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?

This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.

This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users.

Is Apple abandoning the server market forever, or…?

Apple Xserve

Xserve, Apple’s rather elegant server hardware (seen here above), was introduced back in 2002. Less than a week ago, Apple announced that it will be discontinued after January 31, 2011. Apparently, Xserve wasn’t selling enough.

Apple isn’t killing its server OS, though. It will continue to deliver Mac OS X Server, but on Mac Pro and Mac Mini instead.

This means that Apple is backing out of the server hardware business, completely. Mac Pro, although powerful, is a workstation computer, with everything that means in terms of form factor and other hardware design decisions. Mac Mini, although small, can’t be considered a decent Xserve replacement either. Simply put, none of the two are servers.

Modern web browser adoption better than expected: 71% run latest version

Web browsers

Web developers fight a constant struggle: They want to use modern web browser features, but they also need to take browser adoption into consideration. If a large portion of their users run older versions of browsers, web developers will be limited in what they can accomplish.

With this in mind, we decided to find out how many people are running the latest version of their browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.

Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener? (chart)

Goo.gl versus other URL shorteners

A few weeks ago, Google made its URL shortener, Goo.gl, open for everyone and gave it its own website, similar to Bit.ly’s. Previously, Goo.gl could only be used by Google’s own services.

When they announced this, Google made a pretty bold statement: “… we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

That’s something that we should test, isn’t it?

Web designers, keep those page sizes down. It’s for your own good.

SlowYou probably hate slow websites. So do we, and it’s pretty safe to say that it’s a universal rule.

There are a number of factors that can make a web page slow to load, both on the client side (the browser) and on the server side, but one really big factor is page size, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this article. Hopefully you’ll pick up some useful information along the way.

The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000

The worldIt doesn’t feel like 2000 was all that long ago, does it? But on the Internet, a decade is a long time. Ten years ago we were in the era of the dot-com boom (and bust), the Web was strictly 1.0, and Google was just a baby.

Since then people have welled onto the Internet. You don’t actually realize how many more people are on the Internet now until you start comparing numbers. This article is an in-depth study of how the number of Internet users has grown in the past decade.

We’ll start with the whole world, then world regions, then break it down even further into countries. As you’ll see, a lot has happened.

Why Apple’s Mac App Store will be great for both end users and developers

AppleYesterday, Apple announced that it will be launching an App Store for Mac OS X, modelled after the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It will be available 90 days from now and we believe it will be a game-changer for several reasons.

Why? Because it maps a very successful concept from the handheld world to the world of the personal computer (yes, the Mac is a PC…), and it translates very well.

Here is why it will be a success.

How Google dominates the Web

GoogleGoogle began strictly as a search company, and it’s still their bread and butter. However, as the company has grown, it’s spread its tentacles like a giant octopus out to most parts of the Web. A benevolent giant octopus, providing lots of highly useful services, but a giant nonetheless. Try surfing the Web without touching a single Google service. It’s impossible.

Google even shows up in places you’d never expect it to. For example, you know those “captchas” that websites and online forums use to verify that you’re human? Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is currently using the captcha input from hundreds of millions of users to improve its text recognition software.

But that’s just a tiny little service. Let’s see where Google has a more dominant presence, starting with, but not ending with, search.

REST in peace, SOAP

SOAPLooks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.

Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.

SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Powerful transaction monitoring now complements the availability and real user [...]

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Which One You Should Improve and Why

Tracking your website’s exit and bounce rates will give you insight into how [...]

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free