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.

Do you know the hosting locations of the biggest websites in the world? More specifically, do you know in which cities they are located?

Last year we found that 43% of the world’s top one million sites were hosted in the United States, but we felt eager to figure out more exactly where these sites are hosted.

So, to see what could be uncovered, we crunched through the list of the world’s biggest websites.

In today’s branded world, it is almost impossible to imagine a company that does not own the domain associated with their name or brand. But several of today’s famous domains had a very different use before they were big.

For example, did you know that iCloud.com once was the personal homepage of a Japanese professor?

The number of blogs in the world today is huge. Tumblr and WordPress alone have over 157 million blogs. But who reads them all? Following a similar report from last year we now have new and interesting facts that can tell you who reads the world’s top blogs. One thing that took us by surprise was that the average reader of the top blogs is older than we thought. Read on to find all the statistics, some massive charts, and interesting conclusions.

Pinterest can’t challenge Facebook’s 1.06 billion users, but it seems to prove that you don’t need a lot of employees to get a lot of users.

Being a rising star in social media, Pinterest is expanding both in employees and in users. According to our numbers, Pinterest clearly beats both Facebook and Twitter when it comes to the number of users per employee, being the most efficient company in social media right now, at least in that respect.

There is no denying that Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, is big. For example, Android is the OS on 42% of all consumer compute devices.

We have scoured the web for data that will help us show exactly how big Android is in the smartphone world. And in every way we looked at it, Android is ginormous.

When we introduced our FAQ in November last year we did so with the intention to keep adding questions and answers to it on an ongoing basis.

To highlight some of the most common issues reported by you, our customer, we will also publish some of the additions here on the Royal Pingdom blog. This is the first such entry.

The eventual death of the text message, or SMS has been discussed for years now. And is it any wonder, with smartphone sales booming and mobile data skyrocketing?

The demise of SMS would indeed be bad news for the phone companies since revenues for text messages were $128 billion in 2011. Instant Messages (IM), on the other hand, are free and just keep increasing in popularity.

In 2011 we concluded that the volume of SMS was still growing around the world, but the rate of increase was slowing down. Now we are back with new numbers, showing that relatively soon, WhatsApp (one of the more popular IM-services) alone could be as big as SMS.

According to comScore and Business Insider, the biggest website in the world amassed 837 million unique visitors during December 2012. That must have been Google, you might say, but you’d be wrong. In fact, Facebook took the top spot followed by Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and others.

We wanted to put those numbers in perspective and here you can see some of our take on the biggest websites in the world.

We know there are around 2.4 billion Internet users in total in the world, but did you ever wonder how many of them that are awake when you are? We did.

For example, if you live in central Europe you share time zone with millions of people in Africa. And if you live in Australia, chances are you check the morning news on your tablet at the same time as many others in Japan.

We did the same study a few years ago. Now we’re back with the latest data, more information, and  we hope you will like it.

Today, in a world full of smartphones, tablets and terabyte hard drives, it’s hard to remember that not too long ago a computer was a big machine, bytes did not need any prefix, and by storage we meant cassettes or floppy discs.

By searching the archives of Bytes Magazine, we found some classic tech gear from the 70s that may have been hot back then, but that no one would buy today.

Since we launched the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, we’ve seen a great response from you, our customers. The new check type has been used in ways we wouldn’t even have imagined just a short while ago.

We have already published a detailed article covering how to use the Transaction Monitor, but we wanted to give you a few more examples. So here we present ideas of how you could use the Transaction Monitor to keep an eye on login functionality and form submissions on a website.

Facebook overtook the United States as the third largest “country” three years ago, and in September 2012 Facebook announced that it passed the one billion user mark.

China and India are currently the two most populous countries in the world. But can Facebook  become the largest “country” on earth and when will it happened? We think we have the answer.

In the 30 years since the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 very little seems to have happened when it comes to how spreadsheets look and work. When it launched on January 26, 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet; that title goes to VisiCalc. But since it became the killer app of the first IBM PC, it certainly ranks as one of the most important pieces of software ever. We connected with the developer of Lotus 1-2-3, Jonathan Sachs, to get his take on spreadsheets and the last three decades. Read on for the complete interview.

It should come as no surprise that the world’s fastest Internet connection speeds can be found in Asia, with Hong Kong offering an impressive 54.1 Mbps, the fastest in the world. But would you believe us if we said that the world’s slowest connection speeds can also be found in Asia? How is that possible, you ask? Read on for all the numbers.