Power consumption continues to be a major cost (and general head ache) for data centers. The latest numbers come from a consulting firm called the Uptime Institute. Even though server hardware energy efficiency has improved, it is being offset by the continuous increase in computing power.

According to the report, computational performance in servers has increased by a factor of 27 from 2000 to 2006. The problem is that server energy efficiency only increased by a factor of 8 during the same period.

So why is that a problem? Well, here is why (quoted from InformationWeek):

Power consumption per computational unit has dropped in the six years by 80%, but at-the-plug consumption has still risen by a factor of 3.4. Contributing to the problem are processor manufacturers, such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and IBM, packing an increasing number of power-hungry chips into the same-size hardware, which generates more heat that requires increased cooling.

Or, putting it in percent, a 240% increase in data center power consumption.

Of course, it would have been much worse if energy efficiency would have been the same as in 2000. We would have had a 2,600% increase in that case… Now that would have been a problem.

More reading: Servers consuming as much power as color TVs

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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