Have you ever wondered what technology some of the really big websites use? The likes of Digg, YouTube, Myspace and so on?

There is a very interesting website called High Scalability that is dedicated to, as they put it themselves, “building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.” They collect information about the architecture of high-traffic websites to serve as examples to others.

Underlying technology breakdown

We used some of the data from High Scalability to create a table with the OS, web server, scripting language and database used by nine of the largest websites in the world.

The ones we selected were Flickr, YouTube, PlentyOfFish, Digg, TypePad, LiveJournal, Friendster, MySpace, Wikipedia.

Quick Overview

OS: Linux 7 – Windows 2
Web server: Apache 7 – IIS 2 – Lighttpd 2
Scripting: PHP 4 – Perl 4 – ASP.NET 2 – Python 1 – Java 1
Database: MySQL 7 – SQL Server 1 (possibly 2)

Five of the sites use Memcached, a memory caching system originally developed by LiveJournal that has become a popular way to ease the load on for example databases.

Note that not all information at the High Scalability website is complete (but it’s still a great resource).

Finding out more

If you want to read more about these websites, we highly recommend that you head on over to High Scalability. They have a thorough breakdown of the architecture and design choices for each one.

If you are interested in how some other large websites, such as Feedburner, YouSendIt, iStockPhoto and Meebo are built up, take a look at a survey we (Pingdom) made back in February 2007.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

Read more

Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

Read more

Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

Read more

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

Read more

The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

Read more