Posted in
Main on February 5th, 2009 by Pingdom
This week Netcraft reported that there are now 1 million websites with valid SSL certificates on the Web. Only certificates issued by trusted third parties were included in this number.
In a study by Venafi from 2007 (referenced here), 18% of the Fortune 1000 websites had expired SSL certificates. If that ratio still holds true, and holds true for the rest of the Web as well, it means that in addition to the 1 million websites with valid SSL certificates there are 219,000 websites with expired SSL certificates.
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Posted in
Pingdom on February 5th, 2009 by Pingdom
Those of you familiar with us know that we here at Pingdom provide an uptime monitoring service that allows its users the ability to monitor the uptime (availability) of their websites and servers from the Internet. This way, if there is a problem, they will be alerted right away.
Normally our users access their data via an online control panel, but we also have an API that the more technically inclined can use to access their data.
One of the companies that use Pingdom is Camvine, a company with a product called CODA that allows you to display information on remote displays, all managed via a central website.
They have done something we think is really cool, using Pingdom’s API to access their monitoring data, adding a real-time status display for their system.
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Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2009 by Pingdom
Both the video-sharing site Revver and the personalized start page service Pageflakes have been down since last Thursday, January 29. As of this writing, that is more than three-and-a-half days of straight downtime.
Our monitoring shows that both sites went offline soon after 9 p.m. CET (3 p.m. US EST).
The connection between the two? Both are owned by Live Universe, whose site is also unavailable.
The outage is apparently not supposed to be permanent, but something has definitely gone very wrong. Last Friday Live Universe told CNET that the sites would be back within a few hours.
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