When you depend on an external service for functionality for your own app or web service, it often makes sense to monitor it. You want to know when its API isn’t available, because that affects your app.

That’s why we were somewhat surprised when we stumbled upon this in Twitter’s API Terms of Service (their “Developer Rules of the Road”) the other day:

As the Internet keeps growing, so does the number of registered domain names. It makes sense, of course. The number of sites grows, so we need more addresses.

We recently mentioned that we are likely to pass 100 million registered domain names across all country-code top level domains this year (ccTLDs, e.g. .de, .cn, .uk, etc.).

A respectable number, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

We just wanted to let you know that we recently updated our iPhone and Android apps.

So what’s new in this version? Mainly two things:

• The ability to pause/unpause monitoring. We added a toggle control for this on the check info page. This can be handy if you need to do some maintenance and don’t want to trigger a lot of alerts, for example. Just don’t forget to start the monitoring back up when you’re done!
• An outage view, where you can also examine the reason behind each outage. This is the new default view when you tap on a check. Needless to say, this is great for troubleshooting on the go. Tapping on an outage will show you which monitoring locations first detected the outage, and the reason for the error (for example a connection timeout or an HTTP error code).

We want to create a Pingdom hero! Basically a company mascot, a superhero if you like, someone that fights for a fast web, a nirvana where sites load in a jiffy and there is no downtime. Timeouts, 500s, packet loss and other internet issues will be a thing of the past when he’s (and it’s most likely a he) in town.

Since we’ve not done anything like this before, we felt as we should share the process with you all. That includes all the ins and outs that go into creating a character, designing it, getting it manufactured, brought to you – our customers and readers, etc.

We want the process to be fun as well as educational, so hop aboard and let’s go.

Yesterday Mozilla released version 14 of the Firefox web browser. With a range of new functionality and fixes, including HTTPS support for Google searches and full screen support for Mac OS X Lion, there’s a lot to like about the latest Firefox version.

It’s no secret that Firefox has fallen behind Google Chrome in the usage statistics. We took a close look at the browser wars recently, and according to the latest figures for July, Chrome gets 33.8% worldwide, Internet Explorer 31.83%, and Firefox 23.9%.

But that’s worldwide. Could it be that Firefox is still in a leading position in parts of the world?

There were approximately 94.9 million ccTLD (country-code top level domain) registrations in the first quarter of 2012, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief. Given the average annual growth over the last four years, that number is set to exceed 100 million sometime this year.

After months, if not years, of speculation, Digg.com has been acquired. A company called Betaworks snapped up the once so popular social community news site for $500,000, reports state (although the total amount paid by several organizations may have been as high as $16 million).

So what is the future like now for Digg.com? It’s been left in the wake of social networking behemoths like Facebook, and with traffic dwindling, have we seen the last of the “digg this” button?

A really effective way to speed up a website is to add some form of caching layer in front of it. If your web server doesn’t have to keep generating the same web pages over and over, odds are things will be a lot faster for your site visitors. This is where Varnish comes in.

According to our research, 5.2% of the world’s top 10,000 websites are currently using Varnish, a popular open source HTTP accelerator (also called a reverse proxy) that acts as a caching layer between a website and its visitors.

This is a post by guest blogger Wesley David. You can find more information about Wesley at the end of the article.

In my last article “Every sysadmin needs a little SysRq magic” I introduced Linux’s implementation of the SysRq feature that was created years ago in an era of computing history that is rapidly being forgotten. In this follow up article, I’d like to deepen your understanding of Linux’s SysRq support.

Xerox PARC is famous for being the incubator for some of the coolest innovations in technology, including Ethernet and computer networking, the laser printer, object-oriented programming, and much more.

The many brilliant minds at PARC also put together a series of reports called the Blue and white series. These dealt with a wide range of issues from networking, to databases, programming, and beyond.

We have picked out 10 reports from the Blue and white series, all full of great stuff.

We know that webpages on average are getting bigger, and that Adobe Flash is slowly fading away. But even if we tell you that the average web page has since 2010, grown from 702 kB to 1,090 kB, wouldn’t it be even better to visualize it?

Of course it would! So, with the help of data from the HTTP Archive, that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Underneath its simple exterior, the Google search algorithm is a complex beast that calculates rankings and returns results at lightening speeds. It has progressed from humble beginnings to something very sophisticated indeed.

As businesses, we hold our breath with every update and celebrate the success of uplift or pick up the pieces from a penalty. These updates commonly have names, which have become infamous recently – Panda or Penguin anyone?

How well do you know Dewey or Jagger though? Here is an interactive timeline (with a humorous edge) that details the entire catalog of Google search updates since its origin in 1998. Enjoy!

For everyone who is celebrating 4th of July tomorrow (and for anyone else too, for that matter), we’re giving away 1,000 free 1-year Basic Pingdom Accounts. That means you can set up all the monitoring you need today so you can relax tomorrow. To find out more about our service and what the Basic Account offers you, check out our website.

Today Netcraft released its web server survey for July 2012, and we know many of you hurried to read how things have developed since last month (as did we).

What we’ve done is collect Netcraft’s data going back to 2003 and put that in one spreadsheet, which makes it easier to see how things have developed over the last 9 years or so. You can see the rise of NGINX, the fall of a few servers, as well as the continued domination of Apache.

When Google bought Urchin Software in 2005 and released its Urchin on Demand service for free to the entire Internet, the company transformed the web analytics industry forever. All of a sudden there was a powerful yet completely free option available for everyone. Webmasters have rallied to Google Analytics ever since, and as of June this year, 62.4% of the top 10,000 websites use the service.

That kind of market share is quite amazing, and it’s safe to say that Google Analytics is one of Google’s biggest triumphs. Really, the numbers speak for themselves.

It should come as no surprise that the United States is the world leader in hosting websites. But just how many of the world’s top sites are hosted in the US? Following our study of web hosting in Africa, we now broaden the perspective and can announce that 43% of the world’s top 1 million websites are hosted in the United States.

The Web has been abuzz about Pinterest for a while now. There is, shall we say, a great interest in Pinterest. So much interest, it turns out, that Pinterest in all likelihood is now getting more traffic than Tumblr in the United States. And if it isn’t, it soon will.

How did we come to this conclusion? We hit as many data sources as we possibly could and made a highly educated guess, and just so you don’t think we are making this up, we’ll take you through the process.

Africa, with its over 1 billion people, has reached a 13.5% Internet penetration rate, and there are plenty of big websites about the continent.

But where are those sites hosted? It would be safe to assume that there are big sites about Africa hosted outside the continent, but what would be the top 100 sites actually hosted in Africa?

That’s the question we set out to answer in our latest study. Read on to find out what we discovered.

This is a post by guest blogger Wesley David. You can find more information about Wesley at the end of the article.

Glance down at your keyboard. Look to the top right, somewhere above or around the “Page Up” and “Home” keys. If you’ve got a keyboard that follows long standing convention (at least if you’re using a PC), you’ll see a key that has the cryptic word “SysRq” on it somewhere, possibly as an alternate function. It likely shares a key with the words “Print Screen.” If you have a modern Lenovo laptop, you can stop searching for that key, however. In a bold departure from tradition, Thinkpads have recently been bereft of that oft neglected key.

What is this strange key and what does it mean anyway? “SysRQ” is short for the general term “system request”, however that doesn’t shed much light on its purpose. For that kind of information, we’ll need to step into our wayback machine and take a gander at computing history.

Do you use Lynx? If so, you’re one of a rather small minority that use the text-only web browser, which predates even the world wide web. Although it is still perfectly usable for most websites, the lack of graphics makes Lynx less than desirable for most users today.

But our curiosity got the better of us, and we wanted to find out how useful Lynx would be to browse some of today’s top websites. This is the sort of exercise that gives you a warm geeky feeling inside.