Announcing SolarWinds Observability

To say that there were some noise on the Web when Sun recently bought MySQL for $1 billion would be an understatement, to say the least. It’s the largest open source deal ever, and the latest in a series of large open source acquisitions. We kind of understand why Sun thought MySQL was worth a […]

Pingdom showed up in a lot of places last month, both in press, blogs and forums, including a positive review in Microsoft’s TechNet Magazine and also being on the front page of both Digg and Reddit. We keep growing and January was another good month for us, something we are of course very happy about. […]

In November we posted a list in our blog of old Apple Macs that are being used as web servers. Being an uptime monitoring service, we figured we would monitor their uptime and see how they were performing. The post actually ended up on the front page of Digg, which threw an unexpected amount of […]

We’ve all seen those cool movies with endless lines of toppling domino bricks. However, there is way geekier stuff you can use instead of domino bricks… 1. Actual PCs What do you do if you have 86 extra PCs lying around? You can either give them away, perhaps to poor kids or something. Or you […]

Digg has a problem. That problem is that the more users Digg gets, an increasing amount of the stories that reach the Digg front page are bound to be unavailable, brought down by the storm of visitors from Digg. If Digg keeps growing it will automatically kill almost any site that reaches the front page. […]

We have posted pics of some truly messy data center cabling in the past, but this time we figured it was time to do the opposite: Show how some people have managed to organize cables into something close to art. Courtesy of Digital:Slurp. — Courtesy of ChrisDag. — Courtesy of mbm3290. Swedish colors! How could […]

This is a look at the state of Linux through the eyes of Google Trends, Google’s highly useful search trend analyzer. The Linux distributions compared Everyone says Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution, and boy does it become obvious when looking at it through Google’s eyes. With all the buzz, it shouldn’t come as […]

Apple is famous for its well-designed hardware and software. Much of their success is due to innovative products combined with smart marketing. They have always had their own way of doing things. If you’re an Apple fan you have probably seen that famous yellow post-it note. We’re of course talking about the “maintenance” page that […]

Pingdom Tools is a free set of web-based tools for webmasters and other web-curious people. We launched it this summer and it has proven extremely popular. So far, more than two million tests have been performed with its graphical website load time, ping and traceroute tests. We have just added a major improvement to this […]

The January 2008 issue of Microsoft’s TechNet Magazine features a review of Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service. TechNet Magazine is delivered to 100,000 IT professionals. A few quotes from the review: I’ve said this before, and I simply can’t stress it enough: a proactive approach to systems administration will result in less stress and will help […]

Google is one of the best hacking tools out there. It may sound incredible, but relatively simple searches in Google and other search engines can dig out sensitive or even dangerous information about your site, your servers and your company. You want Google to index your site and make you visible and searchable. That part […]

We found this picture and couldn’t believe our eyes. This can’t even be called a cable mess. This is cable CHAOS. “Hmmm… Where does this one lead…?” Hopefully this isn’t your data center. 🙂 Not tired of cable messes yet? Want more? Then check out this excellent, but kind of scary collection.

There are a lot of web hosting companies out there with unusual, strange, or just plain weird names (and URLs). We have collected some of the strangest ones in this post. The trashy www.InternetTrash.com (From their website: “The only place for trashy, tasteless, useless, politically incorrect, silly, stupid, meaningless, obnoxious, waste of bandwidth homepages! Normal […]

Here are some of the places in the media where Pingdom was mentioned in the last month of 2007. You may want to take a deep breath if you are reading this out loud: Washington Post, Linux Journal, The Register, Barrons, Computerworld, Geek.com, Silicon Alley Insider, WebProNews, TechCrunch, GigaOM, Mashable, Read/Write Web, Download Squad, Center […]

A couple of months ago, one of Rackspace’s data centers ran into trouble when a truck crashed into a power transformer and caused a major power outage. In general, power outages are a frequent cause of data center trouble and other service interruptions. Even if safeguards are in place, there is always a chance that […]

Ok, we’re one day late. 🙂 Yesterday, on January 1, it was exactly 25 years since the precursor to the internet, ARPANET, switched over to TCP/IP. Google celebrated this (and the arrival of 2008) by changing their logo for the day, and included a nice little Easter egg. The handshake sequence of the TCP protocol […]

We have gathered 13 of the most notable internet-related outages and incidents of 2007. Why 13? Though you usually can’t blame downtime on bad luck, we thought it was an appropriate number for a collection like this. Now on to the list! The Great Skype Outage Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in […]

The team at Pingdom would like to wish you all Happy Holidays (and a less politically correct Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well!) A list of advice… If you and your colleagues plan on being away from the office like the rest of the population, but still have a service or site […]

In most ways, 2007 has been a great year for Twitter. The service has grown tremendously and has become one of the big social network successes. The flip side of this popularity is that they have often been unable to handle all the traffic their large user base has been bringing in, which has affected […]

120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet every single day. We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a […]