Forums are a great resource, and there seems to exist at least one for every subject imaginable (yes, really). This being the web, there are of course bound to be a lot of forums that focus on webmasters and web hosting.

It isn’t always easy to keep a forum running smoothly. Forum software is notoriously resource heavy, and as forums grow, they can take a significant toll on the server they are hosted on. Since few people are as concerned with uptime and website performance as webmasters, we figured we would monitor the forums where the webmasters themselves hang out.

Why care about uptime, you ask? The short answer is: If a website is down it is invisible, both to visitors and search engines.

Ok, enough talking. Here they are, 20 of the top webmaster and hosting forums and their uptime, response time, and as a bonus, an link to an uptime report page that is being continuously updated.

The table is sorted by uptime. Entries with the same uptime were sorted by response time.

The response times we are showing here include the load time of the HTML page (but no images or other resources), so perhaps we should have called it load time instead of response time. On the other hand, loading the HTML is only a small part of the page, so that would also have been a misnomer. Whatever you call it, it doesn’t tell the whole picture of how fast the entire site loads, BUT it does gives you a general idea of how responsive the site and the server is.

A note on response time

The response time numbers shown here are average values over many days (in this case just over 15 days). What that doesn’t show you is the great variation that can be seen over the course of an entire day, or over the course of a week or a month. There are also bound to be occasional spikes depending on usage (and possibly other factors, for example backups). Here is a good example, taken from our monitoring of Web Host Chat:

Again, note that this includes the loading of the HTML page.

Check out your favorite forum

As we stated earlier, these forums are a great resource, and we set up this monitoring because we were curious to see how they are performing. Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service, so we are always curious about these kinds of things.

We only have a few weeks of data so far, but we will let the uptime monitoring continue, at least for a while, and see what happens. The public report pages will be up and running, so you can easily follow the uptime of your favorite forum(s). The pages are updated every 5 minutes.

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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