We had a look at what kind of uptime guarantees web hosting companies are offering. Especially, how bad they can get. In doing this, we found several examples of web hosting companies that only offer a 95% uptime guarantee. Numbers like that don’t exactly inspire confidence. Why? Have a look below.

With 95% uptime, how much downtime would that remaining 5% make in a 31-day month? The answer is: 37 hours and 12 minutes. That is more than a day and a half that your site would be unavailable! And over the course of a year? A whopping 18 days and 6 hours of downtime.

Don’t those web hosting companies have more trust in their own service than that?

The same could be said, though perhaps to a lesser extent, of web hosting companies offering a 98% uptime guarantee and similar. 98% uptime is the equivalent of 14 hours and 52 minutes of downtime per month, and more than 7 days and 7 hours per year.

Even a 99% uptime guarantee is really far from stellar. That would allow for 7 hours and 26 minutes of downtime per month, and more than 3 days and 15 hours per year. Yet there are lots of hosting companies that only offer a 99% uptime guarantee.

On top of this you should be aware that the uptime guarantee will usually exclude any downtime that happens due to planned maintenance and sometimes other factors as well.

The moral of the story is: If you don’t trust yourself to deliver better uptime than 95%, perhaps you shouldn’t be providing hosting at all…?

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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