The Swedish magazine Internetworld, part of the global IT news service IDG, publish a big web hosting survey once a year where the 15 largest web hosting companies in Sweden are evaluated based on uptime and quality of service. Two years running, we have helped IDG design and perform this test, handling all monitoring tasks for IDG with the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

This is the only test of its kind in Sweden aimed at companies and web entrepreneurs and is a big, annual media event discussed both inside and outside the hosting industry.

This year was the most detailed and fair survey yet. We monitored all web servers and mail servers belonging to the web hosting companies in the survey for a period of three months. All in all, more than 1,200 tests were performed every minute during this period, only for this survey.

We even ended up involving the tested web hosting companies themselves by creating a special control panel for them where they could add or remove servers for monitoring from a list of servers assembled by us, thus giving them a chance to exclude any servers that were not in their production environment (we of course verified the information).

Above: A small snippet of the summary table in the web hosting survey article.

On top of the very thorough uptime monitoring performed by Pingdom, IDG also tested other aspects such as customer service, functionality and ease of use.

Internetworld and IDG.se published the survey in March this year. You can read the whole thing in PDf format on their website. Note that all text is in Swedish.

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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