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The website of the UK bookstore Blackwell was unavailable for more than 7 hours this Wednesday, December 10. Blackwell is the largest academic bookseller in the UK, and one of the first to start selling books online.
The Apple Mac market share has been reported to be around 8-9 percent and growing, but if this search volume graph from Google is any indication, the Mac market share is nothing compared to its mind share.
It can’t be easy to be a web hosting company. On the Internet everybody wants a free lunch (or at least a very cheap one). And this of course includes hosting.
To prove this point, we looked at search data from Google and found something quite interesting for the term “web hosting” (using Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool).
This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.
As you perhaps noticed we didn’t have a summary post last week (due to time constraints here at Pingdom), so this time we will cover the last two weeks.
JPG, PNG and GIF are the three image formats that websites use for their images. We decided to find out exactly how common each format is, and how large the images of each format tend to be. After analyzing more than 23 million images, we have found some very interesting results.
Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.
It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.
At 8:38 a.m. EST yesterday, December 3, the Technorati website all of a sudden started refusing access to all visitors, responding with an HTTP 403 error (access denied). The problem was not resolved until 9:44 a.m.
Wikia Search, the Web search engine from Wikia, Inc. has been having recurring problems with their website since 2 p.m. EST on Monday (December 1).
One third of the requests to the website result in a HTTP 503 server error message (service unavailable).
Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jokes, some are dry and to the point, and some drop the ball completely.
We make our living here at Pingdom by monitoring websites for problems, so we tend to stumble across more of these error pages than most people do. This post includes error and maintenance pages for 24 of the most popular Web 2.0 services out there. While two of them can definitely be considered examples of what NOT to do, the other 22 are here to give you plenty of inspiration and hopefully put a smile on your face.
Cyber Monday saw slowdown and minor issues for several e-commerce websites. A standout was the GAP website which was completely unavailable for a total of 1 hour and 25 minutes.
