We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

Above: A few screenshots from the Pingdom control panel.

Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.

We’re even throwing in 20 SMS alerts for free (you can add more later if you wish to use them), and alerts via email are always free.

In short, this is one heck of a deal. We’re biased, of course, but we suspect you’ll agree.

You can sign up for the Free account on the Pingdom homepage.

Quick facts about Pingdom

Just in case you haven’t heard of it, Pingdom is a service that monitors websites and servers from the Internet and alerts you if there is a problem. It acts like a watchdog, making sure that your website is up and running 24/7.

• You handle all your settings from an online control panel. No need to install anything.
• Tests can be performed as often as every minute.
• Tests are performed from multiple locations on the Internet.
• You can get error alerts via both email and SMS.
• You get access to reports on downtime and response time.
• When an error is detected, Pingdom performs additional tests for you, helping you troubleshoot.

There is much more to the service than the above. For those interested in learning more, have a look at the Pingdom feature tour.

Get a free account

Pingdom is one of the most popular uptime monitoring services in the world and has thousands of customers, including sites like Twitter, Spotify, Last.fm and many others.

If you have a website or blog, why not get yourself a Pingdom account? Let us be your watchdog. We promise to bark if your site goes down!

If you don’t think one check is enough for you, for example if you want to monitor multiple web pages or set up a set of more advanced server checks, then you can of course still use our other paid account types: Pingdom Basic and Pingdom Business.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

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, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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