• 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

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.

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! 

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.

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.

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.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the list:

Here we find that selling on eBay is like selling your soul – with all of the fees they charge and the PayPal fees, I guess it makes sense.

We already know that the Germans make the best knives (see latenight tv), now we know they make the best AdWords ads. I just love these ascii ads — too bad Google has banned them. I’ve watched that second car for hours and it never gets any closer to the car in front of it.

Website monitoring company Pingdom is out with their downtime study for the top social networks for the first four months of 2008. Guess who leads with the most downtime? If you guessed Twitter, you win the prize! Pingdom reports that Twitter has been down over 37 hours in the past four months. Coming up right behind Twitter is the service that wants to go to Prom but has no date, Pownce. Pownce claims an exciting 13+ hours of downtime.

Big player networks MySpace and Facebook came in with 1 and 2 hours of downtime respectively. Now this makes sense, Twitter and Pownce are new and while it seems to the 250 that Twitter has been around forever, they haven’t. Part of their downtime is caused by maintenance and upgrades. Larger networks such as MySpace and Facebook have huge valuations which allow them to have the server capacity and production environments that don’t require downtime for changes.

Below is the downtime chart and also check Pingdom’s analysis.

Pingdom

Some others on the list include:

• googlepoo.com
• googlewebmonitoring.com
• googlewarez.com — aah the early 90s
• googlesex.com – call girl search engine
• googlenewyork.com – oh yea!
• googledaycare.com – get them while they are young
• goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com – yep, can you even count them without getting dizzy?
• thesecretofburritos.com – uhm, perhaps Google is getting into the content business?

Check out the full list on the Pingdom blog.

As a side note, if you are working on a startup, the Pingdom blog is a great learning tool about how to effectively use a blog to generate buzz and traffic. When people click the Pingdom link above to read more, they might venture out to the main Pingdom service. In any event, having a blog that pushes more than the normal product updates is critical to organic buzz generation.

Pingdom

Other notables on the list include Friendster with 6 hours of downtime, LinkedIn at 4 hours, Facebook at 95 minutes and LiveJournal at 10 minutes.

As a side note, these type of blog posts from Pingdom are what I try to explain to new startups all the time. Use your tools to show off your tools. This is something I rarely see and, where applicable, should be on every marketing plan.

In December 2007, Bebo had 30 minutes of downtime. This increased to 320 minutes in January and with only 14 days into February, downtime is at 194 minutes. The interesting thing to note is that in mid-December, Bebo launched their open developer platform. Could the platform be the cause of the additional downtime? Was Bebo not prepared to handle the massive amounts of new traffic and API hits?

Other names in the list: MySpace and Facebook clocked in 10 minutes of downtime this month, Bebo at 30 minutes and Xanga at 2 hours. Yahoo 360 was the big winner with zero downtime in the month.

Don’t forget to check out Pingdom’s special offer for CN readers. Here is the chart from Pingdom:

Using the discount code "centernetworks" (without the quotes) when signing up will give you a 50% discount AND 100 extra SMS for alerts.

To use the code, go to www.pingdom.com/signup, select one of the package types (not trial), and enter the code into the "promotional code" box and press "Apply code". This also works when upgrading from within a trial account.

Note that those 100 extra SMS are on top of the ones that come with theaccount. The promo code is active from today until the end ofthe year.

(CN does not make anything from this promotion, we are just trying to help out the CN community with a service we find valuable)

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?

Sam: I’m a Swedish, dyslectic 30-year-old of Finnish descent. I’ve loved all kinds of problem-solving ever since I was a kid, and I’ve always been very interested in what makes businesses tick and how to expand on those ideas. I feel that I was destined to become an entrepreneur from an early age.

I’m currently running my fourth business, Pingdom, which is an uptime monitoring service. Previous companies include Loopia, which I founded and grew to the largest web hosting company in Sweden before I sold it in mid 2005. At that time, Loopia had 30% of the Swedish domain and hosting market. I also founded Troxo, a software development company that focuses on web-related software.

These days my focus is 100% on Pingdom, which we intend to grow into a market leader.

Allen: What’s Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is a service that monitors the uptime and response time of websites , servers or any other device that is and should be accessible over the internet.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sam: Our service is a web-based tool that gives webmasters and other administrators of servers or web services an easy way to get detailed monitoring from our global network of monitoring servers. The monitoring from Pingdom will detect if websites, servers or online applications are having problems or are unreachable.

If we detect any problems, our customers are notified via SMS or email. They can also examine their historical monitoring statistics, which is very useful for noticing trends and locating errors.

Allen: Why do I need a service such as Pingdom? Doesn’t my ISP provide this?

Sam: There are a lot of reasons to use an external, third-party monitoring service like Pingdom. For one, you can’t always trust your hosting provider or ISP to inform you when they are having issues. Another is that an ISP will usually focus on the network, and there are a lot of other things that can go wrong with your website or web service that is outside of their control. For example, imagine you have uploaded changes to your website that breaks it, or makes it extremely slow. Your ISP will not notice this. It is your responsibility.

Allen: How reliable is your service?

Sam: It’s very reliable. We have built in redundancy in all critical parts of our monitoring network.

Allen: What does the Pingdom team look like?

Sam: We’re a team of nine workaholics. Three guys here in Sweden who manage marketing and customer care, and six in Serbia who handle development and manage our infrastructure.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sam: Our industry is quite young and is still being shaped, so there is a good deal of difference between various uptime monitoring services, both in packaging and pricing. This makes it somewhat difficult to compare services. Feature-wise, I think we are aiming to be a hybrid between WebSitePulse.com and Alertsite.com. I’d like to think that we will be the ones to create a standard and shape the future of the uptime monitoring industry.

Allen: How do you monetize Pingdom?

Sam: Our business model is simple. We are offering an affordable, easy-to-use service that is in high demand. Our infrastructure was designed from the start to be able to handle a very large amount of users and still provide a high quality of service. In other words, we have a lot of users who pay less, rather than a few users who pay a lot. This has allowed us to establish ourselves as one of the fastest-growing uptime monitoring services today.

Allen: Can you provide some stats about who is currently using your service, large/small, usa/elsewhere, etc?

Sam: Last time we checked, we had customers in 127 countries. About one third of our users are located in the US and a similar portion in Europe.

We have a wide spread of "customer types". Some are large corporations, all the way down to individuals, for example bloggers. Examples of companies using our services are Alexa.com, FeedBurner, Foot Locker, Mosso, iStockPhoto and Canonical.

Allen: Do you find being located in Sweden and not Silicon Valley to help or hurt in buzz creation and grassroots marketing?

Sam: Actually, most of our customers don’t seem to realize that we’re Swedish. At least not right away. Even if they did, I don’t really see it as a problem.

The only negative thing I can think of right now, and this has more to do with being outside the US than Silicon Valley, is the time zone issue. We are six hours ahead of EST and nine hours ahead of PST, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult when you want to have meetings and the like with companies (or press) in the US. You get this time shift which can sometimes be awkward to deal with. We have also had to extend our business hours so that we cover daytime in the US as well as in Europe.

Allen: Can you provide some of the elements of your marketing plan?

Sam: We have a three-year plan that we are following, but of course it needs to be adapted along the way. It’s impossible to predict every twist and turn of the market that far ahead.

A key point that we try to apply to all our marketing efforts is that we should always get more than our competitors out of the money we spend on marketing. If we can get more effect for the same amount of money (not necessarily spent on the same things), this will give us an advantage. We try to be clever rather than just going for brute-force traditional marketing, though that has its place as well.

Allen: What’s coming next from Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is in a state of constant development. For example, we just launched a new monitoring package that is specifically aimed at larger businesses and web hosting companies.

We keep working on making the service as useful and user friendly as possible, and are currently developing several very nice features that will be showing up quite soon. They’re still kind of a secret, though. I’ll let you know once we are there.

Allen: What are the most important things that a startup must have to be successful?

Sam: If you ask me, the most important thing is to surround yourself with the right kind of people. As long as you’re working with creative, hardworking and determined people who can really deliver, the rest tends to resolve itself.

Allen: Which feeds are you reading these days?

Sam: I’m all over the place.

Thanks Sam for spending some time with us today!

Pingdom

Now Pingdom jumps into the 404 mania by creating a homepage that is a 404. Check out the home page of Pingdom to view the campaign. Basically you get a large error message that says, "The normal price of Pingdom website monitoring is currently unavailable. Sign up now at a 50% discount or try again in a couple of days for full price." It works great for them because that’s what they do – they ping your page for uptime and 404s are a good way to detect potential downtime. It does appear they confused a few of their customers as they sent out an email noting that it’s just a marketing message and the home page is further down the page. Check out the campaign details on the Pingdom blog.

Check out our previous Pingdom coverage.