If you run a business online, it is critical that you make sure your website is always available. Research made in the United Kingdom indicates that nine out of ten people will go to a competitor if a website is unavailable. In other words, if the door to your store is locked, you are losing both sales and customers.

Not only that, you also lose that elusive element of goodwill. According to the same research, 85 percent of consumers claim that the reputation of a business is hurt by website downtime. Slow-loading websites were also cited as a common reason for consumers taking their money elsewhere.

Image: If a service run by Google can go down, so can yours.

Minimizing downtime is more important than ever
A vast majority of consumers, 85.5 percent, regularly shop online, and that’s bound to increase. The money spent on online shopping reaches new record heights every year, and for you to have a slice of that pie, you need to make sure that your face on the Internet, your website, is there when consumers want to go shopping. They will spend their money, you just have to make sure they give it to you and not your competitors.

As consumers become more Web-savvy, they also become more demanding. They expect websites to always work and load quickly, be it two in the morning or two in the afternoon. Every time you have downtime, you may be losing both present and future customers.

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

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There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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