We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).

How does he do it? He uses a wireless temperature sensor (seen bottom right in the picture below) that he checks the status of via his own server. A small script generates an online status page that contains either “OK” or “Too cold.” This status page is monitored with Pingdom, so Eric will get an alert via SMS if his hot tub is too cold.

Photo by Eric Nagel. (Thanks, Eric!)

Nifty, isn’t it? To see exactly how he set things up, head over to Eric’s blog.

It’s official. You can monitor ANYTHING with Pingdom.

(If you’re using the Pingdom monitoring service in unusual ways, don’t hesitate to let us know. We love this kind of stuff! Who knows, we may even write a blog post about it…)

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more