Ok, we’re one day late. 🙂 Yesterday, on January 1, it was exactly 25 years since the precursor to the internet, ARPANET, switched over to TCP/IP. Google celebrated this (and the arrival of 2008) by changing their logo for the day, and included a nice little Easter egg. The handshake sequence of the TCP protocol […]

We have gathered 13 of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this. Now on to the list! The Great Skype Outage Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in […]

The team at Pingdom would like to wish you all Happy Holidays (and a less politically correct Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well!) A list of advice… If you and your colleagues plan on being away from the office like the rest of the population, but still have a service or site […]

In most ways, 2007 has been a great year for Twitter. The service has grown tremendously and has become one of the big social network successes. The flip side of this popularity is that they have often been unable to handle all the traffic their large user base has been bringing in, which has affected […]

120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet every single day. We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a […]

Usually downtime on the internet is a Bad Thing ™, whether it is network downtime or server downtime or any other malfunction. But let’s face it, there are some things we would happily see go down. Spam servers If spam would end, even for just a while, the mail servers of the world would heave […]

We had a look at what kind of uptime guarantees web hosting companies are offering. Especially, how bad they can get. In doing this, we found several examples of web hosting companies that only offer a 95% uptime guarantee. Numbers like that don’t exactly inspire confidence. Why? Have a look below. With 95% uptime, how […]

Forums are a great resource, and there seems to exist at least one for every subject imaginable (yes, really). This being the web, there are of course bound to be a lot of forums that focus on webmasters and web hosting. It isn’t always easy to keep a forum running smoothly. Forum software is notoriously […]

Today we enjoy websites that are full of content and services that let us take care of anything imaginable online (well, almost). But the ride to our “Web 2.0” world of today has taken quite a while. It has been about 14 years since the first web page with dynamic content was created. This is […]

Bink.nu has published some really interesting numbers about Microsoft’s IT infrastructure. Here is a summary with some additional analysis. Inside Microsoft Internally, Microsoft has 10,000 servers in 3 data centers and one operations center. 6 million internal emails per day. 20 million emails from the internet, of which 97% are rejected as spam.   Interestingly, […]

Apple and the Macintosh computers have a loyal following dating back long before the first iPod ever hit the streets. There are millions of old Macs in circulation, and as would be expected in these days of the internet and tinkering enthusiasts, some of them have ended up as web servers. An old Mac obviously […]

If you are using our uptime monitoring service, you know that we always email you your invoices right away when you have made a purchase. However, there are lots of reasons why you later may want another copy of one or more of your invoices, or a simple way to view all your invoices at […]

Social networks are more popular than ever, and are flourishing in the Web 2.0 era. With their huge user numbers, it is very important for these websites to have a high availability. For the largest social networks, a broken website usually means closing the door on millions of people. To see how reliable they are, […]

Shared hosting is the most affordable way to have a website on the internet. The upsides are the low price point and that you don’t need to know how to set up and maintain a server of your own. But there is a downside as well: You are sharing a server with potentially hundreds of […]

The top 100 websites in the US count their visitor numbers in the millions. They need to care about every aspect of their website to handle (and take advantage of) all that traffic, which includes handling those users who sometimes end up on non-existing pages either by accident or because of an error. This means […]

Rackspace, known for its 100% uptime guarantee, had problems last night when servers in their Dallas data center had to be taken offline for a couple of hours. The reason for the outage was a car accident where a truck drove into a power transformer, which exploded. This caused a major power disruption. When Rackspace’s […]

The tech blog LiewCF.com has given Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service a very positive review. A few quotes from the review: As a full-time blogger, losing traffic means losing money. Therefore, website uptime is a critical issue to me. Besides getting a reliable web server, I also need a good website uptime monitor to notify me […]

There is an interview with Sam Nurmi, our CEO, over at the popular web technology blog and news site CenterNetworks. If you want to learn more about what makes Sam tick, and his thoughts and plans for Pingdom and the uptime monitoring industry as a whole, we recommend that you head over to CenterNetworks and […]

It seems that people are running web servers on basically any hardware they can get their hands on. This is a list of some very unconventional choices of web server hardware. Spud: Potato-powered web server Need we say more? Apparently they ran into problems with rotting potatoes. webACE – World’s smallest web server webACE claims […]

Starting today, Pingdom has gone from offering one single package to offering two packages. The old Pingdom package is now called Pingdom Basic, and the new, more powerful package, is called Pingdom Business. The price for Pingdom Basic is still $9.95 per month, while the price for Pingdom Business is $39.95 per month. What does […]