Announcing SolarWinds Observability

The Swedish magazine Internetworld, part of the global IT news service IDG, publish a big web hosting survey once a year where the 15 largest web hosting companies in Sweden are evaluated based on uptime and quality of service. Two years running, we have helped IDG design and perform this test, handling all monitoring tasks […]

You don’t hear much about the state of the internet in Africa, so we here at Pingdom decided to find out how Africa’s internet is doing. We looked at data traffic and internet penetration (how many in the population have internet access), and came up with some very interesting numbers. Bandwidth (traffic) Internet exchange points […]

For more than five hours today the so-called Slashdot effect was completely absent on the internet. Why? Because Slashdot.org, the extremely popular technology news website that inspired Kevin Rose to create Digg, was according to our monitoring unavailable from 09:38 CET this morning (03:38 US EST) and only came back up a few minutes ago […]

Google Search has been localized to a lot of languages. And with a lot, we mean A LOT. Aside from languages like Swahili, Tamil, Twi, Scots Gaelic, Gujarati, Sesotho, Uighur and many more, Google Search has taken localization one step further by even including fictional languages: Leetspeak Google Search in Leetspeak. Klingon Google Search in […]

The first hacker attack ever to cause physical harm to its victims may have taken place this year. It happened over the Easter weekend, but barely got mentioned around the web, which is surprising. Maybe it happened too close to April Fool’s Day for journalists to believe it was for real. Here’s what happened: Hackers […]

We take search engines for granted these days. They exist because they have to. Without them, going through and finding relevant information in the millions and millions of pages that exist on the web would be an almost impossible task. For example, it would have been extremely time-consuming for us here at Pingdom to put […]

Pingdom recently developed a custom status website for the Swedish web hosting company Binero. It’s basically a WordPress plugin, fully skinnable, which shows the current status of all servers and services of the web hosting company, as well as the uptime history for all services. The different services are categorized and grouped, and tech support […]

Google owns a whole bunch of domain names other than the obvious ones like google.com, blogger.com and gmail.com. We here at Pingdom decided to find out which ones, with some truly surprising results. We only looked at .com domain names, and found thousands. Below are some of the more noteworthy .com domain names that Google […]

We here at Pingdom clearly belong to the “geek category” of people here on Earth. We love computers and technology, and almost anything related to that. Even when the computers have been broken down and recycled, they can provide gratification, as shown by the pictures you see below. This is a collection of art (and […]

We have added another neat feature to the Pingdom website monitoring service. You asked for it, and we listened. You can now export and download a detailed log of your monitoring results to a CSV file (which you can easily view in Excel). Above: You can find the export option on the Detailed Log report […]

Apache and IIS are the most common web servers in use today, but they are far from alone. There is a huge amount of web server software out there, both free and commercial. In this article we present four popular alternative web servers: Lighttpd, Nginx, LiteSpeed and Zeus. The first two are free and open […]

Data Center Knowledge recently published a “Google Data Center FAQ”. As most other web geeks, we here at Pingdom tend to find this kind of information quite fascinating. We have extracted some interesting tidbits, and also used the information to construct a map with all current and under-construction Google data center locations that are known […]

We have surveyed the availability of the official websites of US presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Ron Paul from February 15 to April 7 (using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service). These websites are an important medium for the candidates, where press releases and information about the candidates can be presented, and it […]

According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 […]

There are a lot of bloggers out there aiming to make a living from their blogging (or at least supplement their main income a bit). In the blogging world, content is king, but there are other factors as well. One major factor is basic human impatience. If your blog loads slowly, to a lot of […]

(Actually, this isn’t an April Fools’ joke. 😉 ) When you think Microsoft, Linux and Mac isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind. But, Microsoft does have test laboratories for open-source software as well as for their Mac products (think MS Office for Mac). Here is a little bit of insight into these […]

When you end up following a dead or incorrect link or mistype a URL, you are likely to end up on a 404 error page. It doesn’t have to be a bad experience, though. We have prowled the web for funny and original takes on this classic error page. Here are 17 of the best. […]

Next time your home or office has a blackout, there’s a good chance you can blame a squirrel. Tens of thousands of outages are caused every year by suicidal squirrels being where they shouldn’t be. Many power companies even place special “squirrel guards” on their equipment to try to diminish the problem. The squirrels either […]

We got this reply in our support inbox after having sent a customer a friendly email asking how things were going with his Pingdom account. He clearly got the gist of it, didn’t he? Uptime monitoring can reveal a lot, but we have never seen it boiled down to such a concise and to-the-point message […]

In time for Easter we thought that we should list a few funny and geeky Easter eggs. Easter eggs in software don’t do anything good besides being funny which we of course like. So here we present a few selected ones that we think are funny. Mac OS X Leopard, Blue Screen of Death Start […]