There is a lot of downtime on the internet, more than most people are aware of. That is why we figured it would be interesting to share how many website and server outages we have detected for our customers so far during 2007.

Number of outages in 2007

From the start of 2007 until today, we have detected 1,225,053 website and server outages.

An outage is the period of time from where a server or website is confirmed as down, until it is up again. Outages include everything from short, one- or two-minute outages to outages lasting many hours and in some cases days.

We have thousands of customers and monitor even more sites, but these websites and servers are still just a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the internet as a whole.

Number of alerts in 2007

Most site owners want (and need) to know when their site has a problem. If they are not aware of it, they can’t fix it.

That is why Pingdom has sent out 47,198 SMS alerts and 1,420,386 email alerts in 2007.

Why not exactly as many alerts as outages? Because some users don’t want to be alerted at all, and some only want to be alerted of longer outages (thus avoiding smaller, temporary problems). Some users also want us to send them reminders during an outage.

We hope you found these numbers interesting.

Conclusion

With more than 1.2 million website and server outages detected and almost 1.5 million alerts sent out, we have been able to help our customers to minimize the effects of downtime by allowing them to act quickly once disaster strikes. As long as for example a website is down, visitors will be turned away at the gate.

(Note that the numbers presented here don’t include outages detected by GIGRIB.)

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