The Ubuntu website was unavailable for more than four hours straight this weekend according to GIGRIB. If this had something to do with website maintenance or just an overwhelming demand for the new Ubuntu 7.04 Beta they released last Friday we don’t know. What we do know is that in just one day, Ubuntu has […]

The much-talked-about Shutdown Day took place this Saturday (March 24). As you might remember, last week we added the Shutdown Day website to GIGRIB to see if they, in the name of consistency, would also shut down their own website during that day. … And the answer is, ironically, NOT. Their website was up and […]

Shutdown Day encourages everyone to shut down and live without their computers for one day. The day of reckoning is this Saturday, March 24. Now, if they are really serious about this turning-off-computers deal they should shut down their own site as well… Right? We’ve added www.shutdownday.org to Pingdom GIGRIB to see if the website […]

These are the downtimes so far in 2007 for the websites of some of the more famous OS developers, namely Microsoft, Apple, Sun, FreeBSD, Red Hat and Ubuntu. (URLs link to the downtime report pages for the websites.) Website Downtime www.ubuntu.com 3h 32 min www.redhat.com 2h 40 min www.freebsd.org 1h 56 min www.sun.com 1h 28 […]

Whenever a website goes down it loses exposure. Downtime is always bad, but for some a little bit of lost exposure now and then doesn’t matter all that much. For others it can be a very expensive affair, for example websites that get their income from advertising. The effect of lost exposure is relative to […]

Working together with Pingdom, Swedish IDG magazine Internetworld performed an exhaustive test of 15 Swedish web hosting companies. The test is the basis for selecting the Swedish web hosting company of the year and is a highly popular recurring Internetworld event. The results are always widely discussed both inside the hosting industry as well as […]

That Google is dominating the search industry is not exactly news. According to Nielsen/Netratings there were approximately 3 billion searches made in the U.S. on google.com in December 2006. Though traffic estimates should always be taken with a grain of salt, we decided to make some simplified calculations based on this to see how much […]

Nintendo’s Wii gaming console that was released a couple of months ago came with a new unique controller, the Wiimote. It includes a motion sensor so games are controlled by moving the actual controller. You’ve probably already seen or heard about it. But why play with videogames when you can play with robots? Big robots. […]

There has been a lot of discussion the last couple of years about how power costs have become a major expense for data centers. The latest entry in the debate comes from an AMD-sponsored report by Jonathan Koomey of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to the report, power for servers and their cooling equipment […]

It’s been a week since we published our website infrastructure survey (covering TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto, YouSendIt, Meebo, Vimeo and Alexaholic). The survey has been in the news over at WebProNews, InfoWorld, Internetworld (Swedish IDG), PHP Magazine, as well as a very large number of blogs (CenterNetworks, Ensight, CrunchNotes, TheOpenForce, just to name a few). We’re […]

We stumbled on a geeky but nifty little Web application that converts images to ASCII art, the ASCII-O-Matic. Being geeks ourselves, of course we couldn’t resist seeing what it would do to our logo… 🙂

The DNS root servers, the backbone for handling all domain name queries on the Internet, used to all be located in North America. Not anymore. Thanks to the anycast technology used by six of the root server adresses, the actual locations of the servers have been spread all over the world and their numbers increased […]

No, we’re not monitoring the uptime of the Del.icio.us hotlist… We’re in it. Our survey about the software and technology behind seven of the Web’s most popular sites turned out to be quite a hit. In spite of being released just this Monday it’s already been mentioned in lots of articles and blogs. This morning […]

With its Web 2.0 focus it is easily one of the most popular blogs out there. Linked to by over 15,400 other blogs according to Technorati makes it the 5th most popular blog on the Web. Technorati also has 151,000 feed subscribers according to Feedburner. www.techcrunch.com FeedBurner provides RSS feed management for bloggers and other […]

When your website goes down, whether it’s for planned or unplanned (read: panicky) maintenance, you definitely want to have some kind of temporary landing page. If visitors are just met by a browser error message that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. A company that has repeatedly provided everyone with great, and very amusing, maintenance pages is […]

Sam Nurmi, founder and CEO of Pingdom, has been profiled as one of only 15 people in a new book about entrepreneurship (the interview actually took place way back in October). The book contains plenty of good advice and is part of an initiative to inspire and stimulate budding young entrepreneurs and will be freely […]

It’s Friday (thankfully not the 13th) and we just have to get something off our collective chest. There is a HUGE flaw in the DNS system and the Internet as we know it will probably cease to exist very soon. What are we talking about? The whole Internet rests on the shoulders of 13 DNS […]

Last week there was an attempt to attack and bring down the DNS root nameservers of the Internet with a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The attack caused major problems for at least one of the 13 root nameservers (ironically the one maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense.) This is not the first time […]

As a special Valentine’s Day gift, Pingdom has decided to offer everyone at Web Hosting Talk a full FREE year of uptime monitoring. We love hosting companies (and we’re pretty sure they love us.) This is our way of sending some loving their way on this special day. Image: Note that this is just a […]

We are about to add a new monitoring location in Västerås, Sweden. The server has been installed and is now going through the rough but fair monitoring server boot camp before joining the troops. Image: Shiny new monitoring server resting securely in its server rack. Pingdom will gradually be adding more and more servers. We […]