Announcing SolarWinds Observability

WordPress is strengthening its position as the dominating blogging platform or Content Management System (CMS) used by the world’s top 100 blogs. This year, WordPress is used by 52% of the top blogs, up from the 48% we identified in our study in 2012.

With over 65 million WordPress sites in the world, it’s clear that Automattic’s platform is popular. But let’s have a look at the entire top 100.

The brand new Team plan, introduced just a short while ago, is meant for customers that require more of everything. If you have considerable website monitoring needs, it’s the plan for you. You can monitor up to 500 sites or transactions, tag checks making it possible to filter and sort all your checks, the possibility of paying by invoice, and much more. Like all other Pingdom plans, it also includes Real User Monitoring

One of the most sought after features we added to the Team plan is multi-user log in. Now you can have multiple users per account and control what each user should be able to do, including access to subscription and billing information, the ability to edit checks, etc. Let’s take a closer look at what multi-user log in can do for you and what you can do with it.

By integrating Real User Monitoring (RUM) with your Drupal site, you will get a better understanding of the site’s performance and how real users experience it.

Based on data collected from real users visiting your site, you will see where visitors are connecting from, what browsers and devices they are using, how fast individual pages load, and more. With that information you can then take steps to improve your site’s performance.

We interviewed James Oakley, the developer of a new Drupal module that makes it easy to integrate our RUM service with Drupal. Especially if you are running a Drupal site, you will want to read this.

Today Apple updated its WWDC page announcing that tickets to the annual developer event will go on sale tomorrow, April 25, at 10 a.m. PDT. If you had Pingdom monitoring enabled for Apple’s page, you were likely among the first ones to know about this.

However, since Apple has apparently changed tactics this year, even if you monitored the page with our services, you may not necessarily be one of the first ones to get a ticket tomorrow.

All is not in vain, however. The same technique can be used for many other things.

When you click on a link in a web browser to go to a web page, a complicated process starts. This process should end in the web page being displayed correctly to you, the visitor. If you’re a webmaster, monitoring this process to see how the performance of your site is affected can be critical to delivering a good user experience to your visitors.

The process of loading a web page consists of separate steps called loading states. In this article, we explain how you can make use of loading states data to speed up your site site using our new Real User Monitoring (RUM) service.

If you’re currently looking to take on new challenges, one reason why you would want to join Pingdom is that here everyone, regardless of what they do are geeks at heart.

This means that even though most of us work mainly with the latest internet, networking, programming, and web technologies, we are all geeky. To put it another way, regardless of position within Pingdom, we all approach our jobs in a similar way.

Don’t believe us? We’ll try to convince you.

Thank you for all the great comments we’ve received about our Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, which we released a week ago. Judging from the amount of RUM-related data that is coming in to our systems, you’re busy adding this new monitoring service to your websites. Hopefully you are also busy using the easy to understand charts available in RUM to analyze your site so you can make it faster and more reliable.

You can find all our RUM-related information here, but we wanted to point out a few articles in case you missed them.

Last week we launched our Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, and the response has been fantastic. Our customers have added RUM to scores of websites, and we hope the data collected can help you get a better understanding of the performance of your sites.

We already have quite a bit of information about Real User Monitoring, but today we wanted to address one feature in particular: the long tail of load time distribution.

The best thing with customer feedback is that it make companies become really great. One example is what happened at Pingdom during the last 24 hours.

Yesterday we introduced a number of awesome improvements to make Pingdom an even better choice for all your website monitoring needs. This meant many upgrades and additions for our customers, including more checks in each plan, a brand new plan, and of course the exciting new Real User Monitoring (RUM) as a part of all plans. And this is just the start. We are a big team who plans new exciting stuff.

Essentially, every Pingdom customer got more in the new plans.

We have not only launched our Real User Monitoring service today, we have also upgraded our plans in a way that will benefit you as well as all other Pingdom customers. We’ve also added a brand new plan for customers that require more of everything.

These changes mean significant improvements for all our customers, adding many new possibilities to the services we already offer. It doesn’t matter which plan you previously have been on, this update will make your Pingdom account an even better resource in helping you make sure your website performs at its very best.

Today we can proudly announce that Pingdom’s Real User Monitoring service steps out of the beta mode and is now available to all our customers.

It is the perfect complement to the different types of monitoring we already offer. Real user monitoring (RUM) will give you even better insights into the performance of your website.

By introducing Real User Monitoring, we continue the process of building the complete toolkit that will help us all to make the web faster and more reliable.

Västerås, Sweden — April 10, 2013 — Pingdom, a leading global provider of website uptime and performance monitoring, announced today the release of its Real User Monitoring service. With the new service, website owners will know exactly how real visitors experience their website. The performance data that is collected from all visitors to a website is visualized into easy-to-understand graphs and summaries. This makes the data easy to analyze, and the website owner can see how it relates to browsers, platforms and even countries — all in real-time.

The Swedish company Bahnhof has presented two suggestions for how to turn a 19th century gasometer into a 21st century high tech data center. If these plans become reality, the new data center would arguably be one of the coolest ones anywhere in the world.

Besides being über cool, the proposed data center would also have another interesting twist to it: a clever use for the significant heat generated by its computers.

And since Bahnhof has been a part of designing data centers fit for James Bond villains in the past, there’s every chance that the proposals will become reality.

With our Real User Monitoring service closing in on an official release, we’ve been especially keen to find out what the experience has been like for participants in the beta program. When we noticed a few tweets about real user monitoring by Mauricio Freitas in New Zealand, the admin of Geekzone, we had to find out more.

If you want to monitor your website’s status with a Live Tile in Windows 8 there’s a free app that will let you do just that: Pingdom Alert.

We’re always looking for cool and interesting ways that our customers use our services. To find out more about Pingdom Alert, we reached out to its developer, Patrick Kalkman.

As we’re currently working on brand new Pingdom mobile apps for iPhone and Android phones, we’re going through the process of how to best create apps for multiple mobile platforms.

Should we stick to each platform’s guidelines or should we try to make the apps consistent in look and functionality between the platforms? Or, perhaps there is a third way, which only focuses on providing a great user experience.

Here are some of our thoughts on this.

The “Browser Wars” is an ongoing struggle between three, maybe four actors.

Last year, Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer each dominated two regions of the world.

Now, Internet Explorer and Safari keep losing ground, and one browser strengthens its claim to the web browsing throne. Which browser that is comes as no surprise, but some other developments may.

Surrey Business IT, based in the UK, came across our radar last year when it developed a Windows desktop notifier application for Pingdom’s website monitoring service.

It took us a while, but now we’ve connected with Richard Benson, Senior Web Developer/Technician, to talk about the notifier and all the other exciting things these guys are using Pingdom’s services for.

Last week we showed that the top 1 million web sites in the world were hosted in almost 8,000 different cites. If these cities were evenly distributed across the world, there would be about 40 cities in each nation, but is that really the case?

Following up our own 2012 study, we present this year’s survey of the top 100 web hosting countries. What do you think the major developments were since last year?

Have you ever felt that the price of your broadband is too high? We hear you. But instead of complaining, we thought we should find out where in the world we had to move to get the cheapest broadband possible.

To figure this out, we have analyzed and compiled the latest report from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and can now present a close look at broadband prices for 161 countries across the world.