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Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

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512 terabytes of spam flood the internet every day

120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet

every

single

day.

Spam spam spam spam spam

We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a sample of just over a thousand spam emails).

That lands us on a daily overall bandwidth usage of 120 billion * 4.27 kilobytes = 512 terabytes of nothing but SPAM.

Sure, the main bandwidth hog these days is probably streaming video, but spam is completely unnecessary material that doesn’t add anything good whatsoever:

  1. Added strain on the internet’s infrastructure.
  2. Wasted bandwidth.
  3. Wasted disk space on mail servers AND workstations.
  4. AND finally, how many legitimate emails aren’t missed because they disappear in the masses of spam?

This is just wishful thinking, but SPAM, PLEASE GO AWAY!

(Image courtesy of freezelight.)

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Up or not? Keep track of your favorite US sports websites

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.

Read more

Google Maps turns 7 years old – amazing facts and figures

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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No news is good news for the Super Bowl website

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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