Announcing SolarWinds Observability

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 […]

Selecting a location for a data center can be a complicated issue with a lot of factors involved. John Rath from the Data Center Information blog has written a white paper about data center site selection that should be a good starting point if you are in the US. Above: The US sure has a […]

We have just added a new check type for monitoring DNS servers and DNS lookups. Why should I monitor my DNS servers? If DNS lookups are not working, no one will be able to access your website since there will be no way to translate your domain name to an IP address. (Computers on the […]

When your website gets indexed by Google it will be added to Google’s regular crawling. This means that Google will load pages from your site at a regular interval. If your website is popular (high traffic and many inbound links) it will be crawled more often than if it is seen as a less important […]

We recently blogged about some statistics we have collected on different reasons why a website can be down. Our statistics mostly covered software and network issues with facts about the most common problems. With this in mind we found it interesting when we encountered a survey by Aperture Research Institute done back in April 2007 […]

Jesse Robbins has a nice post over at O´Reilly Radar called “Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)”. It’s an interesting piece on how to plan effectively for operations when launching a startup. His basic thesis is that most startups think of operations as something boring and because of this spend too little […]