Posted in
Pingdom on October 21st, 2009 by Pingdom

Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.
Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).
You can of course still get Pingdom alerts via email and SMS, just like before.
Pingdom has actually had Twitter as a customer for a long time, and using their service to add even more value to ours was the next logical step for us.
Promoting openness about site problems on Twitter
Part of our goal with the Pingdom uptime monitoring service has from the very beginning been to promote transparency around the reliability of hosting and service providers on the Internet. We believe that people should be aware of service issues and that providers shouldn’t be able to hide them from their users.
People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.
Free Pingdom + Twitter = Free SMS alerts
Since Pingdom is already free to use (for monitoring one site), the combination with Twitter means that people can use Twitter alerts to get free SMS alerts as well via Twitter. This will work everywhere where Twitter offers free SMS, for example in the United States, Canada and for some mobile operators in the United Kingdom.
It doesn’t have to cost a penny to monitor the availability of a site, even with a professional service like Pingdom which lets you test sites every minute. Downtime is more common than most people think, and it is now very easy for webmasters to make sure that their web hosting company is delivering a quality service. In short: stop speculating and get the facts.
We hope you will find the Twitter alerts useful.
For more information about Pingdom, please visit www.Pingdom.com or contact us.
Want to test your site every minute?
Posted in
Main on February 6th, 2012 by Pingdom
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
Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
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
Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main,
Mobile podcast on February 2nd, 2012 by Pingdom
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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Stefan Seiz
October 21st, 2009 at 4:20 am
Feature request: If i want to receive alerts via twitter DM, i have to follow @pingdomalert. But this means i will have all your public alerts in my timeline, which i have no use for.
I suggest you add a second twitter account e.g. @pingdomalertdm where you never post public alerts and which you only use for sending DMs.
That way, i could receive DMs only by following @pingdomalertdm
Pingdom
October 21st, 2009 at 8:39 am
@Stefan Seiz: All “public” tweets from @pingdomalert are directed to a specific Twitter user (starting with @twittername). You won’t see those in your timeline even if you follow @pingdomalert. Only those directed at your user. (And ok, those users you follow, if they show up.)
Dan Butcher
October 21st, 2009 at 8:56 am
The ability to post from our twitter account would be great, so any of our followers would know something was down.
I don’t use Pingdom at the minute, but this would probably make me switch
Pingdom
October 21st, 2009 at 9:04 am
@Dan Butcher: Good idea, and one that’s occurred to us as well.
It’s on our to-do list.
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:15 am
Can we customise ‘tweets’?
We’d like to use something like “ooops – looks like serverx is having a problem. Don’t worry, we’re on to it!”
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:16 am
@Dan Butcher + 1
(didn’t realise it didn’t already do that – not much use to us then!)
Pingdom
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:39 am
@Simon Pearce: The ability to post via your own Twitter use is on its way (right now you can either get a DM or a status message to @youruser from @pingdomalert). Regarding customizing Twitter alert content, no immediate plans, but we’ll look into it.
Simon Pearce
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:06 am
Thanks @Pingdom – had ten mins free this morning so wrote this!
If you want to have Twitter update your own feed with up/down reports:
http://www.simplewebhosting.co.uk/blog/automatically-post-pingdom-updates-to-your-twitter-feed/
Pingdom
October 26th, 2009 at 8:27 am
@Dan Butcher and Simon Pearce: You can now send Pingdom alerts from your own Twitter accounts as well.