Sooner or later, every site or application will fail. However the consequences depend not only on how the failure is managed but also on how it is communicated. Recently the web hosting company Media Temple and even Google have well illustrated how hard it is for modern connected organizations to re...

Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research proje...

In 2008 the stock market fell into shambles, the real estate market tumbled, big companies announced big layoffs, VC investors became more careful, and the entire world economy went downhill. It’s enough to put a sour face on the most optimistic person. But now contrast this with what happened...

A new year has arrived, and we here at Pingdom have dived headlong into it. For example, just last week we launched a new iPhone app that can be used to access our uptime monitoring service. And while 2009 promises to be a great year for us, we certainly can’t complain about 2008. In fact, 2008 ha...

Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually ...

First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks! We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we ...

Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here). For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or ...

In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us): An interesting ques...

It can’t be easy to be a web hosting company. On the Internet everybody wants a free lunch (or at least a very cheap one). And this of course includes hosting. To prove this point, we looked at search data from Google and found something quite interesting for the term “web hosting”...

Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jok...