WordPress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much WordPress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

Note that this article is about the WordPress.com blogging service, not the WordPress blog software (which is located at WordPress.org.)

WordPress.com growth before 2009

At the end of 2008, WordPress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs, according to this graph below (showing the growth from the start in 2006 through 2008).

That the long-term growth for WordPress.com is trending up is also clearly visible in the graph above. It looks a bit like a very even exponential curve (i.e. it’s not just growing, but the growth rate is increasing as well).

Estimating WordPress.com growth in 2009

As the situation looks like now (see graph below), between 10,000 and 15,000 new blogs are added to WordPress.com each day, so let’s say that on average 12,500 blogs are added to WordPress.com on a daily basis.

Now, some people will delete blogs as well, and Automattic has a graph for this data as well, revealing that there are on average about 1,000 blogs deleted per day.

If we take these deletions into consideration, the WordPress.com blogging service is growing with an average of about 11,500 blogs per day.

So, if we use this 11,500-per-day number as a starting point, how much would WordPress.com grow in a year? The answer is: nearly 4.2 million. (365 x 11,500 = 4,197,500)

If WordPress.com hosted a bit over 5 million blogs at the start of 2009, and if we take the increasing growth rate into consideration, it looks quite likely that WordPress.com could pass 10 million hosted blogs by the end of 2009.

Making predictions like this will always remain speculation (we don’t have a crystal ball), but judging by the past and present growth of WordPress.com it really does look like it could break the 10-million-blogs barrier before the end of 2009. Impressive. Looks like their servers will be kept busy…

The graphs are all from the WordPress.com stats page, but we added our own notes (in red) to the daily growth and deletions graphs (which is pretty obvious).

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

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

Read more