Posted in
Main on April 27th, 2007 by Pingdom
One of the best things about the web is that it’s global, but this can also be a great challenge for webmasters. When you want to do maintenance on your website, you have to keep in mind that it’s always daytime somewhere. As the saying goes, the web never sleeps.
Let’s take an example. 2 a.m. seems to be a pretty common time to initiate a service window where servers and other services are restarted or worked on. Assuming this is done at 2 a.m. in California, USA, what time is it elsewhere in the world?
- 5 a.m. on the US East Coast.
- 10 a.m. in Europe, for example UK.
- 6 p.m. in China and Australia.
As you can see, it may be in the middle of the night for you if you’re a California-based company, but the day is well under way in other parts of the world. Even just counting USA and Europe will leave you without dead time. There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web.
If your website targets for example English-speaking countries, you at least have USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand to think about. There are also numerous countries with English as a second language.
Make sure you can perform your upgrades and your maintenance as seamlessly as possible. Just shutting down the entire service really isn’t an alternative anymore.
If you absolutely have to shut down your entire service for a while, examine the visitor logs on your web servers and try to find a window where as few people as possible will be affected.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on May 16th, 2012 by Pingdom
Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.
Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.
Perhaps you live in one of them.
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Posted in
Main on May 15th, 2012 by Pingdom
Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.
This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.
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Posted in
Main on May 14th, 2012 by Pingdom
The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.
But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.
In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.
What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.
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Posted in
Main on May 11th, 2012 by Pingdom
Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.
Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.
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Posted in
Main on May 11th, 2012 by Pingdom
“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.
This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.
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[...] The average downtime per month for these ten websites is around 40 minutes, which has to be considered to be within acceptable limits, even though zero downtime is of course preferred by users. After all, the web never sleeps. [...]
[...] An interesting note here is that a service like Digg has plenty of international users, meaning that no matter when they take the service down, it will be daytime somewhere. No matter when they do it, users will be affected. As we have pointed out before, there simply is no “in the middle of the night” on the Internet. [...]
[...] There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web – Some food for thought before the next time you perform maintenance on your international website. [...]