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 […]

A month ago we released an Apple Store status banner that was powered by Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. Anyone could put it on their website to show the US Apple Store status (up or down) in real time. The reason this is interesting is of course because Apple usually updates or releases new products in […]

There has been a lot of talk about the decline of Apache’s dominance as a web server, with competition from IIS and other alternatives like Lighttpd, but Apache is still king of the hill when you look at the top 100 websites in the US. We here at Pingdom have noted a very wide range […]

We found this on Flickr and simply had to share it with you. It’s a Pingdom response time graph for a user who switched web hosting provider, with quite a drastic effect on his load time. Courtesy of MellerTime at Flickr. Could the switch possibly have been around 4 p.m…? 🙂

We decided to analyze how five of the most talked-about web hosting companies have grown over the last few years. The results are really interesting. Since we didn’t have inside information about these companies, we looked at the number of domain names on their DNS servers, and how these numbers have changed over time (from […]

Some faces in IT we see over and over again. The media write about them practically every week. We figured we would show you some pictures you DON’T normally see. Linus Torvalds, Linux As you’re used to seeing him. Young Linus having a good time. (We skipped the one were his shirt’s gone off. No […]

StumbleUpon is a great way to find interesting and fun material on the internet. However, just as with Digg, sometimes you land on pages that are either very slow or won’t respond at all, which can be very frustrating. So here is a suggestion that would make the stumbling even easier and more efficient: Automatically […]

Google is about to make landing page load time a factor in their AdWords Quality Score. The goal is to reward fast-loading websites and punish slow-loading ones, all to improve the ever-important user experience. From Google’s Inside AdWords blog: Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher […]

We came across a very interesting article in Wired called A Lesson in Internet Anatomy: The World’s Densest Meet-Me Room. Over 260 ISPs, including major network providers like AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, all cross-connect in a single data center in an office building in downtown LA. Scissors and other sharp objects cannot be welcome here… […]

The American Express homepage (home.americanexpress.com) was unavailable for over five hours today. During that entire time the page responded with an HTTP 404 error (page not found). Visitors to the homepage were met by a simple text message: “File not found.” The problem lasted from 05:47 a.m. to 10:52 a.m. Central European Time (11:47 p.m. […]

Today we have transatlantic cables of massive capacity, handling all sorts of telecom traffic (including the internet). However, these submarine cables had a modest beginning. The first successfully deployed commercial transatlantic cable was in 1866, after a decade-long series of less successful attempts. Sending messages over this cable was incredibly expensive. The cost of speed […]

Researchers at Bell Labs have managed to transfer optical data at the incredible rate of 16.4 Tbps over a 2,550 km distance (1,584 miles). That is 2.05 terabyte (2,050 gigabyte) per second, which is leaps and bounds ahead of what normal network equipment can currently handle. What 16.4 Tbps transfer speeds are capable of To […]

There is a lot of geeky graffiti out there. Some are just scribbles on a wall (programmer art being as it is), and some definitely qualify as artwork. It’s no secret that we here at Pingdom are geeks ourselves, and we had a “geek graffiti collection marathon” the other night where we found some really […]

We have just released a new set of reports in the Pingdom control panel. These reports give you even more flexibility than before when viewing your uptime, downtime and response time monitoring results. Note that these new reports are still in beta and will receive some additional polish, so this is the perfect time for […]

This is a list of 14 of the largest social networks in the world, and how much downtime they have had so far in 2008. Social network site downtime, Jan 1 – Feb 25, 2008 Social Network Home page (monitored) Downtime in 2008 (until Feb 25) Bebo www.bebo.com 12h 28m Windows Live Spaces spaces.live.com 7h […]

Since February 8, the Joost website has had outages almost on a daily basis. Some short, some up to an hour long. With a full week left of February, the website has already been unavailable for a total of five hours and ten minutes this month. This can be contrasted with January, when they had […]

As the whole Mac community knows, when Apple Store goes down for maintenance, there is a good chance that Apple is about to release something new or update an existing product. To spare you the trouble of constantly keeping an eye on the Apple Store, we here at Pingdom have set up monitoring of the […]

It’s no secret that there has been an on-going war over customers in the web hosting industry for many years. Together with the technical evolution of computer hardware, this fierce competition has drastically increased what you get for your money when you buy a web hosting account. The people behind Pingdom originally came from the […]