Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Website status checks should be a routine part of any IT maintenance schedule. Corporate websites are often hosted externally, but this doesn’t mean they should be excluded from the checklist of applications and servers needing to be monitored. But what’s website status, and how do you check it properly? Website Status – What You Need […]

The time it takes a page to load has become one of the defining factors for website success. Web users are notoriously impatient, abandoning any site they feel is taking too long to load. Reducing page load time should be a strategic priority for all website owners, given that it impacts many other metrics such as pages per session, bounce rate, and conversion rate.

Even a few seconds of downtime may have a direct and substantial effect on the company balance sheet, especially for e-commerce. The impact of downtime isn’t solely about lost sales as many visitors are landing on your webpages to conduct research about future purchases. If the website is offline during this research process, the effect […]

APIs make the world a bit smarter. They help us improve and extend what others have already built. They allow us to use data and functionality in ways the API authors couldn’t imagine. The SolarWinds® Pingdom® product team always wants to empower our customers and give them full access to their data and our functionality. […]

For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. Not only has the construction of supercomputers helped push the envolope of what is possible within the computing field, but the calculations supercomputers have performed for us have helped further both science and technology, and ultimately our lives.

This post pays tribute to some of the most powerful supercomputers the world has seen, all the way from the 1970s until today.

If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? If no one visits your website—the web application critical to your business—does it really exist? And if they do visit, their actions there determine the value of what you’ve built. And if it doesn’t matter, your site won’t exist for long, because the investments […]

Work-Life Unbalance Stress is at an all-time high in the workplace and at home. It’s hard to leave your stress at the office when you bring your computer home or have email, Slack, and more on your phone. An article in Forbes on January 19 shared a study by the Korn Ferry Institute, revealing that […]

Most website elements, such as scripts, images, and videos, have either direct or indirect impact on web performance. Reduce the number of errors and optimize the underlying elements correctly, and you’ll significantly improve the availability, performance, and profitability of your online operations. A website error checker is an invaluable tool for helping you get a […]

SolarWinds® Pingdom® and SolarWinds AppOptics™ are two products used for monitoring web applications. If both of these products monitor web applications, why would someone want to use them together? This blog post answers that question. At a high level, Pingdom monitors your application from the outside looking in, similar to how your users experience it, […]

It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.

This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: Size, storage space, and price.

On the internet, content is king—but the technology serving your website is queen. A speedy, responsive website is crucial to positive user experience, and to driving sales. Optimizing your WordPress website should be a strategic priority, especially if its goal is to drive conversions. Here are 11 best practice tips to help improve your site performance.

Maintaining maximum website uptime is vital to competing in the always-online global market. This is particularly crucial for e-commerce businesses, where every second of downtime may cost millions in lost revenue in terms of aborted transactions, plus loss of future business from customers who refuse to return.

Digital experience monitoring (DEM for short) is fundamental to delivering a great experience to customers. Why? The quality of experience offered to website visitors has a direct bearing on how much they spend (if anything), and whether they go on to become a repeat customer.

Alerting is the cornerstone of any monitoring tool. When your website goes down, or when there’s a problem, you want to know about it before it affects your customers or business. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the importance of alerting, potential issues with alerts and how to maximize the value of setting up […]

Given that most websites today exceed two megabytes, content optimization is more important than ever. This is particularly true for mobile users who may experience sluggish cellular data speeds due to network limitations or data throttling. As websites grow in size and complexity, developers need to be aware of content optimization tools and methods that help them improve website performance.

We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today.

For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself?

Websites have become larger and more complex over the past few years, and users expect them to load instantaneously, even on mobile devices. The smallest performance drops can have big effects; just a 100ms decrease in page load time can drop conversions by 7%. With competitors just a click away, organizations wishing to attract and […]

Code names can be about secrecy, but when it comes to software development, it’s usually not so much about secrecy as it is about the convenience of having a name for a specific version of a software. So what kind of code names are developers out there coming up with?

Nowadays we are used to having hundreds of gigabytes of storage capacity in our computers. This was pure science fiction only a few decades ago. For example, the first hard disk drive to have gigabyte capacity was as big as a refrigerator, and that was in 1980. Not so long ago.

We computer geeks are a breed of our own, and as with any group of people with mutual references, we often make jokes and observations that are totally incomprehensible to outsiders. So consider this post a litmus test. If you laugh at these jokes, then you are most definitely a computer geek.