Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Do you know the hosting locations of the biggest websites in the world? More specifically, do you know in which cities they are located?

Last year we found that 43% of the world’s top one million sites were hosted in the United States, but we felt eager to figure out more exactly where these sites are hosted.

So, to see what could be uncovered, we crunched through the list of the world’s biggest websites.

In today’s branded world, it is almost impossible to imagine a company that does not own the domain associated with their name or brand. But several of today’s famous domains had a very different use before they were big.

For example, did you know that iCloud.com once was the personal homepage of a Japanese professor?

The number of blogs in the world today is huge. Tumblr and WordPress alone have over 157 million blogs. But who reads them all? Following a similar report from last year we now have new and interesting facts that can tell you who reads the world’s top blogs. One thing that took us by surprise was that the average reader of the top blogs is older than we thought. Read on to find all the statistics, some massive charts, and interesting conclusions.

Pinterest can’t challenge Facebook’s 1.06 billion users, but it seems to prove that you don’t need a lot of employees to get a lot of users.

Being a rising star in social media, Pinterest is expanding both in employees and in users. According to our numbers, Pinterest clearly beats both Facebook and Twitter when it comes to the number of users per employee, being the most efficient company in social media right now, at least in that respect.

There is no denying that Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, is big. For example, Android is the OS on 42% of all consumer compute devices.

We have scoured the web for data that will help us show exactly how big Android is in the smartphone world. And in every way we looked at it, Android is ginormous.

When we introduced our FAQ in November last year we did so with the intention to keep adding questions and answers to it on an ongoing basis.

To highlight some of the most common issues reported by you, our customer, we will also publish some of the additions here on the Royal Pingdom blog. This is the first such entry.

The eventual death of the text message, or SMS has been discussed for years now. And is it any wonder, with smartphone sales booming and mobile data skyrocketing?

The demise of SMS would indeed be bad news for the phone companies since revenues for text messages were $128 billion in 2011. Instant Messages (IM), on the other hand, are free and just keep increasing in popularity.

In 2011 we concluded that the volume of SMS was still growing around the world, but the rate of increase was slowing down. Now we are back with new numbers, showing that relatively soon, WhatsApp (one of the more popular IM-services) alone could be as big as SMS.

According to comScore and Business Insider, the biggest website in the world amassed 837 million unique visitors during December 2012. That must have been Google, you might say, but you’d be wrong. In fact, Facebook took the top spot followed by Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and others.

We wanted to put those numbers in perspective and here you can see some of our take on the biggest websites in the world.

We know there are around 2.4 billion Internet users in total in the world, but did you ever wonder how many of them that are awake when you are? We did.

For example, if you live in central Europe you share time zone with millions of people in Africa. And if you live in Australia, chances are you check the morning news on your tablet at the same time as many others in Japan.

We did the same study a few years ago. Now we’re back with the latest data, more information, and  we hope you will like it.

Today, in a world full of smartphones, tablets and terabyte hard drives, it’s hard to remember that not too long ago a computer was a big machine, bytes did not need any prefix, and by storage we meant cassettes or floppy discs.

By searching the archives of Bytes Magazine, we found some classic tech gear from the 70s that may have been hot back then, but that no one would buy today.

Since we launched the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, we’ve seen a great response from you, our customers. The new check type has been used in ways we wouldn’t even have imagined just a short while ago.

We have already published a detailed article covering how to use the Transaction Monitor, but we wanted to give you a few more examples. So here we present ideas of how you could use the Transaction Monitor to keep an eye on login functionality and form submissions on a website.

Facebook overtook the United States as the third largest “country” three years ago, and in September 2012 Facebook announced that it passed the one billion user mark.

China and India are currently the two most populous countries in the world. But can Facebook  become the largest “country” on earth and when will it happened? We think we have the answer.

In the 30 years since the introduction of Lotus 1-2-3 very little seems to have happened when it comes to how spreadsheets look and work. When it launched on January 26, 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet; that title goes to VisiCalc. But since it became the killer app of the first IBM PC, it certainly ranks as one of the most important pieces of software ever. We connected with the developer of Lotus 1-2-3, Jonathan Sachs, to get his take on spreadsheets and the last three decades. Read on for the complete interview.

It should come as no surprise that the world’s fastest Internet connection speeds can be found in Asia, with Hong Kong offering an impressive 54.1 Mbps, the fastest in the world. But would you believe us if we said that the world’s slowest connection speeds can also be found in Asia? How is that possible, you ask? Read on for all the numbers.

Pingdom was given the honor of being named “Company of the Year” for 2012 by Västerås Science Park, in competition with over 200 local companies.

“We are very happy to receive this award. It gives us all a sense of being on the right path. It’s in recognition of the both hard and smart work we put in,” said Sam Nurmi founder and CEO of Pingdom.

There are many web services that can extend the functionality of your Pingdom account in different ways, and now there’s one more. With Zapier, you can connect your Pingdom account to more than 100 web services. In fact, Zapier lists almost 200 services in total, which you can use to automate your digital life.

The classic video game manufacturer Atari filed for bankruptcy last Monday, the 21th of January. Why should we care, you might wonder? We should care because of what Atari did for arcades and video games in the 70s and early 80s.

To pay homage to gaming history in general and Atari, in particular, we bring you some interesting, funny, and whacky facts from the history of the company.

As you most likely know, we recently experienced two outages. This post is an update on what we are currently doing to avoid this from happening again and also what we will be doing next.

To make it clear, we already had redundancy in software, machines and network, which were to take over if anything went wrong with our system. Unfortunately, this didn’t work as expected since our issue was one step further down in the chain.

The issue we have been facing is related to our virtualized infrastructure and the storage systems that it uses. So this is what our entire team is focusing on in our short term and upcoming fixes.

In less than a week, we’ve experienced two outages. In fact, these two outages combined have been the worst since the company was founded in 2007.

We wanted to take this opportunity to give you an update on the situation and tell you where we go from here. The current status is that all our core websites and services are up and running as they should. This includes the monitoring you have set up of your websites, alerts, our API etc.

There is so much happening on the Internet during a year that it’s impossible to capture it all in a blog post, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? These are some of the questions we’ll answer for you.

To bring you these answers, we’ve gone to the ends of the web – wherever that is – and back again, and compiled a list of truly fascinating facts about the year that was. Some of the numbers are snapshots taken during the year, others cover the entire period. Either way, they all contribute to giving us a better understanding of Internet in 2012. Enjoy!