Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Yesterday we released a big, brand new report about social network site uptime in 2008.
Included in the report are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Friendster, LiveJournal, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, Windows Live Spaces, Last.fm, Classmates.com, Reunion.com, Xanga and Imeem.
The full report is available as a free PDF, but we have lifted out some interesting data from the report here below.

The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.

You may remember the incident that Google had on January 31, when it during 55 minutes accidentally flagged all URL:s containing “/” as a potential malware site. This meant that every single site on the Internet was marked as harmful, including Google.com.
This is a look at some interesting side effects of that incident.

Symmetry and asymmetry, structure and detailed designs. Are we talking about art? In this case, no, we’re talking about silicon chips, integrated circuits and electronics. Look at these close-ups and macro shots, and you’ll see why sometimes they could just as well be considered art.

If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, we hope that the insights below may help you to a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.
Considering that we specialize in website and server monitoring, we tend to think about these issues all day long, all year long. Several people here at Pingdom also have plenty of experience from having worked in the web hosting industry. This means that we have both the insider’s and outsider’s perspective on web hosting, so we figured we were in a good position to share some insights about web hosting that many people aren’t aware of.

The ever-popular Slashdot was unreachable for over an hour last evening due to massive amounts of traffic hitting its network. Normally Slashdot is known for bringing other sites down with the traffic it generates (the so-called Slashdot effect, or slashdotting).

We thought it was time for some fun of the geekier kind. If you know what IPv6 is, this should be something for you.
You may have seen IPv6 addresses that contain a couple of actual words. Here is a made-up example: babe:f432:42aa:8271:eee6:1076:dead:beef
Now what if we take this one step further, and construct entire sentences inside IPv6 addresses instead of just a few words? We decided to do just that, and here is how we did it.

This week Netcraft reported that there are now 1 million websites with valid SSL certificates on the Web. Only certificates issued by trusted third parties were included in this number.
In a study by Venafi from 2007 (referenced here), 18% of the Fortune 1000 websites had expired SSL certificates. If that ratio still holds true, and holds true for the rest of the Web as well, it means that in addition to the 1 million websites with valid SSL certificates there are 219,000 websites with expired SSL certificates.

Those of you familiar with us know that we here at Pingdom provide an uptime monitoring service that allows its users the ability to monitor the uptime (availability) of their websites and servers from the Internet. This way, if there is a problem, they will be alerted right away.
Normally our users access their data via an online control panel, but we also have an API that the more technically inclined can use to access their data.
One of the companies that use Pingdom is Camvine, a company with a product called CODA that allows you to display information on remote displays, all managed via a central website.
They have done something we think is really cool, using Pingdom’s API to access their monitoring data, adding a real-time status display for their system.

Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?

Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.
Our monitoring shows that both sites went offline soon after 9 p.m. CET (3 p.m. US EST).
The connection between the two? Both are owned by Live Universe, whose site is also unavailable.
The outage is apparently not supposed to be permanent, but something has definitely gone very wrong. Last Friday Live Universe told CNET that the sites would be back within a few hours.

Considering the massive amount of websites that are using Google Analytics it is of course extremely important that the Google Analytics script is always available and responding well so that website visitors will have no problems loading it.
We use Google Analytics ourselves here at Pingdom and think it’s a great tool for keeping track of our visitor traffic. Since we have included the GA script on both our main website and our blog, we were curious to see how well it performs and how reliable it is (uptime wise).

We recently released our new Pingdom iPhone application which lets you view the current status of your checks on your iPhone as well as view some of the configuration settings and statistics for the last 30 days.
We have now finished version 1.2 which contains some more fixes.

President Barack Obama is said to be significantly more tech-savvy than his predecessor, so one might wonder how he felt when the White House mail server suffered a meltdown yesterday, leaving his entire press office without access to the official White House email addresses for much of the day.

In 2008 the stock market fell into shambles, the real estate market tumbled, big companies announced big layoffs, VC investors became more careful, and the entire world economy went downhill. It’s enough to put a sour face on the most optimistic person.
But now contrast this with what happened with the Internet in 2008:

• The number of websites increased by 20%.
• The number of domain names increased by 19%.
• Not to mention that there were more than 1.4 billion people on the Internet, a number that will keep growing.

A DDoS attack on the DNS servers of the domain registrar Network Solutions slowed down access to hundreds of thousands of websites during several hours last Friday (January 23).

What happened with the Internet in 2008?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many blog posts were published? This post will answer those questions and many others with more interesting statistics than you can shake a stick at. 🙂
We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested.

A new year has arrived, and we here at Pingdom have dived headlong into it. For example, just last week we launched a new iPhone app that can be used to access our uptime monitoring service.
And while 2009 promises to be a great year for us, we certainly can’t complain about 2008. In fact, 2008 has been a very good year for us.
So we decided to share some numbers with you.

The video-sharing site Revver has been having some major stability problems for a while now.
On November 1, Revver told TechCrunch that they were migrating to a new service provider:

Greenspan checked in and says they are in the middle of major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider which “should make the quality of Revver videos displayed better then ever” (could take a few days).

The question is how well that migration has gone.
Our monitoring reveals that in the past month, the Revver website has been unavailable for a total of almost 24 hours. In just the last week, it has been down for more than 6 hours (including a 5-hour outage on January 17).

The blogging service Blog.com was unavailable almost 8 hours straight last Friday (January 16).
The outage started at 5:05 a.m. CET and didn’t end until 12:50 p.m. CET (a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes). The site was completely unreachable during that time, indicating either a server or network failure.