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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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