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Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

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Posts Tagged ‘automattic’

The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services of 2011

blogging services logos

There are millions upon millions of blogs available today, and many of them are hosted on dedicated blogging services. These kinds of services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for WordPress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr.

One of the main benefits of using a blogging service is that they make blogging easy. There’s no need to deal with traditional hosting. You blog, the blogging service keeps your content available online.

In theory, blogging services should also be able to make your blog more reliable since they have a lot of servers at their disposal, often spread across multiple data centers. If your blog gets flooded by traffic (usually a good thing), a blogging service has a much better chance handling it since your traffic is just a drop in the ocean for them. Had you been on a single server (or even a shared one), your site might not have coped.

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WordPress turns 8 today

WordPressExactly eight years ago today, Matt Mullenweg announced that the first release of WordPress was available for download. We wonder if he knew what he was starting.

Much has happened with the blogging software since then. For one, WordPress has become the most popular blog platform in the world, which is no small feat. It’s also without a doubt one of the most successful open source projects ever created.

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wordpress.com blog counter

Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic built on top the world-famous Wordpress software, is about to hit another major milestone: 20 million hosted blogs.

Now on to the insane part: Tumblr, which has to be considered a relative newcomer on the blogging scene, has now almost caught up with Wordpress.com. The difference between the two is currently just 1.5 million blogs, and that is shrinking fast.

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Internet companies with few employees but millions of users

Crowd

The Internet has given even small companies the chance to reach a huge audience worldwide. This has resulted in a number of companies and organizations that provide services to a huge number of users in spite of having a relatively small number of employees.

The companies and organizations we’ve included here have at least an estimated 10 million users or more.

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WordPress.com now hosts half of all WordPress blogs

WordpressAutomattic, the company behind the popular open source blogging software Wordpress (found at Wordpress.org) and the Wordpress.com blogging service, recently revealed some very interesting new statistics. This little nugget of gold caught our attention (emphasis added by us):

There are over 32 million WordPress publishers as of December 2010: 16 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 16.7 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

That there are more than 32 million Wordpress blogs in total is impressive, but it is the world’s most popular blogging platform so the number should be high. The really amazing number here is that very close to half of those blogs are now hosted on the Wordpress.com service.

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The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the Web

Blogging services

Blogging services have been around for a long time, with pioneers like Blogger paving the way for Wordpress.com and more recent arrivals like Tumblr and Posterous. There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, many of them residing on these services.

One big bonus of using a blogging service is that they take much of the pain away from having a blog since they handle the hosting for its users and everything is already set up. Once you publish, the responsibility for keeping that content available online rests firmly on the shoulders of the blogging service.

With that in mind, we decided to test five of today’s most popular blogging services to see how reliable they actually are.

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Code name LonghornCode names have been around for a long time. Remember the Manhattan project in the 1940s? That turned out to be the atomic bomb. Thankfully, not all code names hide such sinister projects.

Code names can be about secrecy, but when it comes to software development, it’s usually not so much about secrecy as it is about the convenience of having a name for a specific version of a software. It can be very practical to have a unique identifier for a project to get everyone on the same page and avoid confusion.

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10 of the most popular (and useful) WordPress plugins

Wordpress has risen to be a powerhouse on the Internet that now dominates the blogosphere. It was started by the (now) 25-year-old Matt Mullenweg. Last week he was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. On the show Matt revealed that Wordpress has such a strong presence on the Internet that at least one in three Americans online have visited a Wordpress blog in the last month.

Wordpress lets you use thousands of powerful plugins that complement and extend the platform in a variety of ways. I have scoured the Wordpress Plugin Directory to find the very best plugins to share with you in this post.

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WordPress.com set to grow past 10 million blogs in 2009

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!

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The hardware behind the newest WordPress.com data center

The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.

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