Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Microsoft’s social network clocking the most downtime

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, we took 12 of the largest social network sites in the world and tested their availability (uptime) over a one-month period. The included sites were MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360.

Windows Live Spaces (formerly known as MSN Spaces), Microsoft’s social network with an estimated 27 million unique visitors per month, finished last in the test with a total of three hours of downtime. The majority of that downtime occurred during US daytime on October 19 (a Friday), so it must have affected a very large amount of users.

In contrast, Yahoo’s old initiative in the social network arena, Yahoo! 360⁰ (which looks like it will be to be replaced with Yahoo! Mash during 2008) came out on top with zero downtime, while the two social network giants MySpace and Facebook (both fighting for supremacy) only had 10 minutes of downtime each during the same period.

Downtime for social network home pages Oct 19 – Nov 19, 2007
Social Network Home page Downtime
Yahoo! 360 360.yahoo.com 0m
Facebook www.facebook.com 10m
MySpace www.myspace.com 10m
Bebo www.bebo.com 30m
Last.fm www.last.fm 35m
LiveJournal www.livejournal.com 40m
Reunion.com www.reunion.com 1h 10m
Orkut www.orkut.com 1h 25m
Classmates.com www.classmates.com 1h 40m
Friendster www.friendster.com 1h 50m
Xanga www.xanga.com 2h 10m
Windows Live Spaces spaces.live.com 3h 0m

Social networks, by their very nature, have users who are very active and visit the site frequently, generating a lot of page views. This makes any downtime more noticeable, since it means a larger loss of page views than for a “normal” site (view an older article expanding on this). In the Windows Live Spaces example, three hours may not sound like all that much over a month, but it is three hours of lost page views and ad exposure that Microsoft will never get back.

Note:

The survey measured the home pages of the 12 included social network sites from October 19 to November 19, 2007. If a home page did not respond within 30 seconds, or gave an error back, it was counted as down.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free