The team at Pingdom would like to wish you all Happy Holidays (and a less politically correct Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well!)

A list of advice…

If you and your colleagues plan on being away from the office like the rest of the population, but still have a service or site running online, here are some things to keep in mind.

1. Print out a contact list with all key personnel and suppliers.
2. Make an extra backup of all important data.
3. Keep your cell phone with you so you can be reached in case of an emergency.
4. Make sure you have someone on call in case of an emergency, if this is not your usual routine.
5. Make sure that whoever is on call can remotely log in to your servers to be able to correct any problems that arise.
6. Monitor your servers, website and other key services (email, DNS, etc), so you can receive alerts if there are any problems. Hopefully you use Pingdom for this.
7. If you have your own datacenter, make sure to double check (or better yet, triple check) that your backup power works in case there is a power failure. All those Christmas lights may take their toll on the power grid, you know…
8. Remember to have FUN! It’s supposed to be a holiday, after all.

Follow this advice so you won’t have to choke on your Christmas dinner because your site has crashed (knock on wood), or come back to the office a week later only to find out that you have had several days of downtime.

Now off to enjoy the only downtime that we encourage: Time off!

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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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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