Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Google’s new Wikipedia-competitor, Knol, has made quite a splash lately. The strange thing is, Google doesn’t own the domain name Knol.com. It belongs to a Dutch company specialized in steam cleaning equipment. (Google’s Knol website is located at knol.google.com.) A burst of traffic to Knol.com The Knol.com website (i.e. the one not owned by Google) […]

Google-branded merchandize shows up from time to time, and we here at Pingdom were kind of wondering where people outside of Google get hold of this stuff. And lo and behold, Google has its very own online store, GoogleStore.com. There is some pretty neat stuff in there, so here is our (highly subjective) pick of […]

There have been a lot of numbers thrown around in the last year about the power consumption of servers and data centers. For example, servers and their cooling are now said to consume more power than color TVs in the US. To try and make a bit more sense out of the general information overflow, […]

As you may know, in addition to our monitoring services, we have a free load time test for web pages. It has proven very popular, and recently we were contacted by a guy who had a smart suggestion: Please make a bookmarklet for it. So we did. Simply drag the following link to your browser’s […]

We have collected some of the best quotes from three of the most influential people in the history of operating systems: Steve Jobs (Apple), Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Bill Gates (Microsoft). Some of these quotes may surprise you, especially the older ones. For your convenience, we have put the quotes in chronological order. (We have […]

The people over at the popular micro-blogging service Twitter are using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service to watch over their availability. There is even a permanent link to a public Pingdom report page on the Twitter status blog, so anyone can get an updated view of their Web availability at any time. Above: Screenshot from the […]

Most people who have worked with IT have at one time or another in their work life come across some amazingly strange practices or major oversights that in retrospect seem more or less insane. Here is a collection of crazy stories specifically about data centers and server rooms that we have filtered out from the […]

When it comes to security, there is often a focus on the software side, thwarting hackers and other virtual threats such as viruses and worms. When it comes to uptime and availability, focus often rests on redundant power, clustering, and other similar strategies. We often forget about something that can put a stop to any […]

Traditional news media have embraced the Web, and these days we have a lot of great news sources online. We here at Pingdom have surveyed 13 of the top news websites in the world, monitoring the likes of CNN, Reuters, the New York Times and Times Online. The survey ran for the first half of […]

What if you could have a type of monitoring that would store a value of your choosing, and a status of your choosing, based on a script on your servers? A kind of “universal” check type that you can customize as you wish on your end. Well, now you can. We have added a new, […]

Every OS out there can be updated over the Internet. In fact, this functionality is a critical and important part of the OS, and updates are often done in an automated fashion. Windows has its Windows Update, Mac OS X has its Apple Software Update and Ubuntu has its main repositories. We have measured the […]

According to a recent survey by the Swedish computer magazine PC för Alla, women seem to be consistently more frustrated than men when it comes to computers and the Web. (For those of you who don’t speak Swedish, “PC för Alla” translates to “PC for Everyone”.) The highest frustration levels are understandably brought on by […]

On June 23-24, O’Reilly held the 2008 edition of Velocity, a conference focused on web performance and operations. Unfortunately no one from Pingdom was able to attend (much to our great dismay considering the subject matter), but luckily for us the slides for a lot of the presentations have been made public. We have scoured […]

Not long ago we all used an ordinary encyclopedia when we needed to find information about something. Today the Internet can give us the answer to (almost) anything. When it comes to getting the facts on basically anything between heaven and earth, one particular site really stands out. Yes, Wikipedia, we are talking about you. […]

A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it. We thought this would be interesting in relation […]

We noticed an interesting thing the other day while doing some research with Google Trends. The number of searches in Google for the term “web hosting” has decreased a lot in the last four years. Compared to the high points in 2004, there only seems to be ¼ as many searches for web hosting in […]

There has been several blogs that lists the best Firefox extensions that are out there. Since Pingdom are operating in the web performance and monitoring field we decided to make our own list of valuable Firefox extensions. In this list we don’t cover the well known extensions such as Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug but […]

We recently bought a bunch of new servers stacked with RAM and dual quad core CPUs. They will be used for backend processing of Pingdom’s monitoring data and some other tasks. We shipped them out to a data center in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, and wanted to share some photos of the “event” […]

Most of us have at least one computer at home, some may even have a few. And then there are the ones that almost run their own data center at home, for private use. We had a discussion here at Pingdom when one of our staff members re-configured his home network and added lots of […]

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it. However, when we started to actually look around we were happily surprised. There are lots of women involved in Open Source! […]