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.

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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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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