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 […]

We wanted to do a price comparison between some of the better-known uptime monitoring services. Since we have time and time again stated the importance of frequent tests when monitoring websites and servers, we decided to compare the price for monitoring a website with a one-minute monitoring resolution (testing every minute). Prices for many services […]

Who hasn’t had a problem accessing a website on the internet? Our guess is that there isn’t anyone out there who has had an error-free experience of the web. But what are the main reasons for all these problems? We decided to find out. Since Pingdom is a website monitoring service with thousands of customers […]

Allen Stern over at Center Networks noted yesterday that it seemed like the RSS delivery service Feedburner was having some issues. He then made an interesting comment: Where is Pingdom with an uptime report? We would have loved to help you out, Allen, but unfortunately we don’t have any Feedburner monitoring data of our own […]

A while ago, Pingdom published a report on the availability of online storage services, showing how often they were offline. For any such service on the internet, availability is a very important factor. The service that scored best in the test was MailBigFile. They have capitalized on the value of having independent third-party information that […]

CNET Download.com, the mega-popular software download service, was down for more than an hour on Tuesday evening. The website is ranked as the 111th most trafficked in the world. Other popular CNET websites such as News.com, Gamespot and Gamefaqs were also unavailable during this time. Considering the downtime occurred in the evening in the US, […]

How much a single website is offline can vary a great deal from month to month. Some months, everything can be flawless, not a minute of downtime, while other months, perhaps thanks to one or more network outages or server problems, a website can be unavailable for hours. Therefore it would be interesting to see […]

Red Hat, one of the more popular Linux distributions, especially for servers, is taking pretty good care of their website (which we assume runs on Red Hat Linux…). Downtime for the Red Hat website in 2007   January 2h 30m February 10m March 1m April 39m May 0 June 0 July 54m August 4m September […]

We have just added three new dedicated check types for monitoring mail servers, one each for SMTP, POP3 and IMAP. For these check types, the connection to the specified mail server uses the selected email protocol (SMTP, POP3 or IMAP), something which gives you a very reliable indication that the mail server is up and […]

Google News and Yahoo News are the two largest news aggregators (and news search engines) in the world. Both Google and Yahoo earn their money mainly through advertising, and these websites have so much traffic and so many page views that any downtime they have will be very expensive since it becomes the equivalent of […]

Back in March (March 27, to be exact) our uptime monitoring network was performing 100,000 checks per hour. This means 2.4 million tests of websites and servers every day. We keep saying that we are growing, and guess what? In the six months since then, this number has increased to 287,909 checks per hour, which […]

Myspace and Facebook are the two giants in the social network arena. We let them face off in three categories: the number of searches in Google, website traffic, and availability. All to see which one comes out on top. Website traffic How much traffic do they have? The answer is “a lot”. According to Alexa.com […]

Last week we (Pingdom) released a survey of the uptime of Google’s localized homepages for 32 countries. It turned out to be very popular. So who wrote about it? Here are a few examples: eWeek, Times Online, PC Magazine, NetworkWorld, CNET News.com, CNET Webware, TechCrunch, GigaOM, WebProNews, IDG in Sweden and in Brazil, IT Wire, […]

(To be honest, we added this feature almost a month ago, but here is a proper introduction.) Sometimes you may want to temporarily pause monitoring of some of your websites or servers, or you may want an easy way to temporarily disable alerts to one or several of your contact persons (or all of them!). […]

TechCrunch was one of the places that wrote about the Google uptime report we published last week, where Google’s Brazilian homepage turned out to have the best uptime. Interestingly enough, it looks like a Brazilian Google engineer has commented on the article. See screenshot from TechCrunch below. For those who prefer plain text, here is […]

Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil, according to this unique one-year survey from Pingdom. Google has a large number of localized versions of their Google Search homepage. We have monitored the uptime of Google Search for 32 different countries during a […]