We’re closing in on 500 articles here in our blog (this is number 498), and a fair share of these have been articles that are useful to webmasters (including bloggers). Therefore, here is a selection of our best and most useful articles written with webmasters in mind.

We’ve divided them into the following groups for your viewing pleasure:

• About hosting quality and reliability
• The importance of minimizing website downtime
• The importance of a fast-loading website
• Website usability and error pages
• Website security
• Webmaster tools and references

We hope you will find this article collection useful!

About hosting quality and reliability

• 6 gotchas about web hosting quality and reliability – If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, this article will give you a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.
• Keep track of your shared hosting performance – Learn about common performance culprits in shared hosting.

The importance of minimizing website downtime

• Online launch troubles and how to avoid them – Lists some real-world website launch troubles from 2008 and what you can do to avoid similar problems with your own website or product launch.
• How downtime can kill all your SEO efforts – A look at how Google punishes you for having an unstable website, and what you can do to avoid it.
• There is no “in the middle of the night” on the web – Some food for thought before the next time you perform maintenance on your international website.
• Mashups easily (s)mashed – Mashups have made the Web a more interesting place, but such a large and complex beast as the Internet doesn’t always behave well, something mashups are extra sensitive to. This article looks into mashup availability issues and what can be done to minimize any problems.

The importance of a fast-loading website

• Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs – This is a survey we made of how large (in download size) the top blogs are, including an analysis of the results which includes tips about getting pages to load faster (and why it’s important). This article is relevant not just to bloggers.
• Why having a slow website will hurt your blogging income – Why a slow blog (or website) is a very bad thing if you’re trying to make a living from it, and how to keep on top of things. You will find out about ill side effects you may not have been aware of. Again, this article is useful not just to bloggers.
• Speed up your website by optimizing files and images – A quick primer to help you get started with making your website both smaller and faster.

Website usability and error pages

• New SSL policy in Firefox hurting tens of thousands of sites – How the strict SSL policies in new web browsers like FF3 hurt a lot of websites from a usability standpoint.
• Are there 219,000 websites with expired SSL certificates? – Just in case you didn’t think that many websites are affected by the article above…
• 17 brilliant 404 pages and why they are cool – Good error pages are part of the user experience. Get some excellent inspiration here.
• Having fun with 404 error pages – More 404 inspiration.
• 24 fun and inspiring Web 2.0 error pages – And even more 404 inspiration. And yes, we end the article with tips on what to keep in mind when designing your own error pages.

Website security

• Don’t let Google find your secrets – Google is actually a great tool for hackers. Learn how it works and what you should look out for to protect your own website.

Webmaster tools and references

• A handy uptime and downtime conversion cheat sheet – This is, just as the title implies, a cheat sheet that you can use to easily convert between uptime percentages to downtime. There is even a printable PDF version.
• 12 great iPhone applications for sysadmins and webmasters – Love your new iPhone? Put it to good use as a webmaster tool with these nifty applications.
• 14 useful and FREE online tools for DNS and network troubleshooting – Again, the title says it all.

Thank you for reading!

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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