Pingdom Archive

Monitoring service Pingdom has put together a list of the top incidents for 2010 across the Web. Most of the incidents are outages at some of the biggest web services – many of which were reported here on CN first.

Pingdom notes, “The truth is that the Internet is not quite as stable and solid as most of us would like to believe. It’s a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break from time to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.”

Some of the services Pingdom looks at include: Wikipedia, Twitter, WordPress, Gmail and, of course, Tumblr.

For a fun history lesson, check out their top incidents report from 2007.

Here are today’s exciting Yankees win startup and entrepreneurial updates:

• Pingdom adds Twitter alerts – Pingdom
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Drupal 7 – Sloth edition – Acquia
• Trick or treat! – Vivaty
• Why send real gifts when you can send virtual gifts on Ning for $1.50! I am totally sending a troll to someone I know! – Ning
• 5 Best Apps to Take on Date – mobClix
• Drop.io launches version 2 of their API – Drop.io

Web site monitoring service Pingdom has announced the launch of a free plan option today. Paid plans are still available starting at $10. The free plan is only limited by the number of websites that can be monitored — which is one website. They are even offering the free customers SMS alerts – I’d have left that out of the free plan as an incentive to push people into one of the paid plans.

Pingdom notes, “Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.”

I wonder how Pingdom will make sure that webmasters don’t signup for 100 accounts, each monitoring one website. I guess creating all of those accounts would be more of a hassle than just signing up for a paid plan.

Web site monitoring service Pingdom has released a new iPhone application that allows website owners to monitor their server uptime while on-the-go. The application includes the ability to view the current status of your websites, view site history for the past 30 days and get detailed information on each of the tests Pingdom performs.

The application is free (you must have a paid Pingdom account to use the app) and I like the concept because there are times when I receive emails from CN readers that the site is down and so I can check the status via the Pingdom application.

Hosting company MediaTemple launched an iPhone application which allows a customer to manage their hosting remotely. I hope more webhosts provide remote services in the near future.

Now the question is… where’s the Windows Mobile application for those of us without an iPhone! 

Day #8 in the Holiday Gifts giveaway goes to Pingdom. We’ve covered Pingdom many times on CN and the company describes their service as:

Pingdom is a professional service for monitoring the uptime and response time of servers, websites, and other online services. It will alert you immediately via email and/or SMS if there is an error, for example if your website goes offline. The service is handled via an online control panel which also gives you access to plenty of reports and statistics.

Pingdom has offered CN readers 20 free basic accounts (normally $120) for a year and they are throwing in 20 sms alerts as well. It’s first come first served so follow the directions below to get your free account.

All free accounts are now gone!

Editor’s note: This post is part of our Holiday Gifts series. The company listed didn’t pay CN for the listing. The content above was provided by the company.

Website monitoring service Pingdom has completed a bit of analysis about Google and their products. They found that 45% of their products are in beta currently. Some of the more popular Google products in beta include: Gmail, Google Docs, the new Chrome browser and Google Video. Playground products weren’t included in the 45%.

Interesting to note that Google App Engine is a "preview release" as opposed to a beta. Why is Google keeping their products in beta? Pingdom notes that companies normally don’t charge for beta services while Google does charge for some of their beta products. I’d disagree, there are plenty of services that charge while in beta. It can help to validate a product.

The beta tag is like a shield to protect against bugs and downtime. If a service in beta is down, it’s easy to say "hey it’s in beta, give them a break!"

If Flickr could move out of beta, certainly Google could do it too.

Web site monitoring service Pingdom is out with another report today, this time focusing on Google Analytics usage within the Alexa top 500 sites. Pingdom verified each site and found that 32.3% of the top 500 use Google Analytics to monitor their sites. The 33% number is a bit high in my opinion. Most large sites use "industrial" analytics applications like Omniture or Webtrends.

Pingdom suggests that most use Google Analytics because it’s free. What we still do not know is how the data is used on the backend – even if Google suggests it’s not being used, it’s still being dumped into the huge database that Google maintains on each one of us.

My guess is that if Pingdom runs the same test on the top 2,000-10,000, the Google Analytics count will be much higher – probably in the 60% range. This is currently their sweet spot – outside the Fortune 500 and down to the brand new blog with one reader.

I still believe a combination of internal trackers and external trackers (both for the local site and for the competition) is the optimum combination for success.

If you are interested in not being tracked by Google as you browse site-to-site, check out James Thomas’ article about how he lives without Google.