We have just launched a campaign on the Pingdom website.

Why do people use uptime monitoring? A huge reason is to know if there is a problem with their websites or servers. No one is immune against downtime, but sometimes it can be hard to explain the point of using uptime monitoring in a simple way.

However, everyone surfing the web has seen error pages, and this is of course one of the things we detect.

We decided to play with this a bit, so our homepage is currently showing a big 404 error message. (Imagine how ironic it would be if our own homepage would actually be down or not working?)

Take a second look, though, and the error isn’t about a missing page, but about a missing price (we are offering a 50% discount).

Note: We have had real website downtime ourselves in the past, but at least we found out right away thanks to our monitoring and could solve the problem. Phew.

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.

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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!

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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”.

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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.)

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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.

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