Announcing SolarWinds Observability

It’s easy to forget that just 20 years ago, mobile phones were a rarity (and the size of a brick). These days we all take them completely for granted and everybody has one.
All these years, mobile makers have competed with each other mainly by trying to outdesign and outfeature each other on the hardware end. Hardware, hardware, hardware. It’s always been the focus. Making the phones smaller, putting cameras in them, making the screens better, and so on. Tech specs were the way to stand out.

As you may know, PayPal suffered from downtime yesterday. Overall, the problems lasted approximately 4.5 hours before being fully resolved. Since a significant number of e-commerce sites and online services handle some or all of their transactions through PayPal, how much money did the PayPal outage end up costing its users?

Customer service goes hand in hand with a smile, and none take this more seriously than the Japanese. But how serious are they really about smiling? Apparently, very serious:
In a positively Orwellian move, 15 Tokyo railway stations will be equipped with smile detectors to make sure that their staff is smiling enough. Frowns will literally be frowned upon. High tech meets mood control.

Tomorrow is System Administrator Appreciation Day, which means one thing: Be nice to your local system administrator. Do something nice. Get them something special. Have a party. Get them some insanely cool hardware.
Your system administrator probably deserves more respect than he (or she) is getting, so give them this one day of the year to feel really special and appreciated.

Just imagine how extremely happy we were when the following email dropped into the support inbox here at Pingdom:

Pingdom was made to directly alert our users of any downtime that might occur on servers and websites. But in many cases it’s a good idea to configure your Pingdom checks to first wait for a while and only alert you if the downtime continues.
In this post we give some recommendations on how to configure your Pingdom alerts to avoid getting alerts for temporary issues that might go away automatically before you even have time to get to a computer.

How long have today’s most popular websites been around? This is a survey of when today’s top 50 websites began their lives.
What we here at Pingdom wanted to discover when we made this survey was not just how old the most popular sites are, but to see if we could discover any interesting trends based on that, and we think we did.
For the extra curious we’ve also included a table with the individual launch years for all of the top websites at the bottom of the article.

We stumbled upon this street sign on Flickr and just couldn’t resist putting this composite together.
No words necessary, really. 🙂

This is a guest post by David Walsh from WebHostingSearch.com.
HostingCon 2009 in Washington DC is just around the corner. It is the largest hosting conference and provides a great opportunity for people in the industry to discuss the future and the changes in the industry. We are going to give you a sneak peek at 10 trends that most likely will be discussed at the DC event.

In June Google launched a Web community with the specific long-term goal to make the Web faster. The tone of Google’s presentation when launching this initiative was very much “let’s do this for the good of the world”.
Although we like the altruistic aspects of this, it’s worth noting that Google is looking out for number one here. Google is doing this because it’s good for Google.
And here is how.

We know Twitter is getting a lot of press these days, but how much? And how much media attention are they getting compared to other hugely popular sites and companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google? Read on to find out.

Sony Ericsson just reported a $300 million loss for the second quarter of 2009 and Nokia reported a 71% decline in profits for the same period. Times are tough for the (shrinking) mobile giants.
Gee, wonder why…?
Have a look at this article for a very telling illustration.

There has been some speculation recently whether Twitter should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize for its role in the recent events in Iran.
So while we’re speculating, why not consider Twitter for some other Nobel prizes as well? How about the Nobel Prize in Literature for its role (together with text messaging) in helping us evolve the English language?
Or wait…

Are you a programmer? Want to do something for the environment and even make the world a better place? Then start optimizing your code!
It seems like today the solution to most software performance issues is to throw more hardware at the problem instead of making the software run faster on existing hardware. Doing more with less is a forgotten mantra, and Wirth’s Law continues to ring true:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

When talking about measurements, why be like everyone else and use the standard metric system or American units when you can stand out considerably by making almost no sense at all?
To help you with this, we at Pingdom have gathered up a whole bunch of highly unusual units for measuring distance, time, volume, and even geeky things like coolness, fame and smell.
Off we go…

Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.
What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.

What we search for online reveals our interests and what is going on in our lives at the time. In other words, Google knows what all of us are up to. 😉
Google has some nice tools that enable you to examine overall search trends. Although we here at Pingdom usually look at trends to see if they are increasing or decreasing over time, many search terms also have recurring patterns that can be quite fun to study, with interest flaring up on a seasonal or otherwise periodic basis.
These patterns are what we’ll be looking at in this article.

We all know which sites are popular today, but at one point they were new up-and-comers with an uncertain future. What was the buzz around these websites when they were just getting started? What was being said? We’ve done the digging so you can do the reading.
We looked for early mentions of YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google in the press and blogosphere.

There are plenty of both formal and informal rules that programmers love to quote, either because they’re fun or quirky, or simply because they are useful and thought-provoking.
We’ve gathered some of the most interesting ones for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

For those of you who use our Mr. Uptime Firefox extension, we just wanted to let you know that we have updated it for Firefox 3.5.
The update was submitted to Mozilla last Friday and is pending approval, but you can already download it directly from the Mr. Uptime website. (It’s free, as it always has been.)
For those of you who don’t know what Mr. Uptime is, it’s a Firefox extension from us here at Pingdom that will tell you when a broken website is working again.