Posted in
Main on February 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
Yesterday a Twitter post (a tweet) by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore became so popular that traffic from Twitter crashed a blog. This sounds very similar to a common social media phenomenon originally known as the Slashdot effect (and later also the Digg effect), where a post on a popular social media site pushes more traffic than the target site can handle.
An interesting thing here is the mechanics of Twitter, which is fundamentally different from Digg and Slashdot. It’s not a social news site, with a front page that all visitors go to. We won’t go into the details of how Twitter works, that’s better covered elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that it’s a very different beast. It will be interesting times if Twitter is about to join the ranks of Slashdot and Digg as a potential “site crasher”.
For lack of a better word we will call the phenomenon of sites crashing as a result of traffic from Twitter, “the Twitter Effect”. (Or perhaps “the Tweet effect” would be catchier…?)
But now on to the big question: How could a single tweet generate that much traffic?
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Posted in
Outages on January 19th, 2009 by Pingdom
The blogging service Blog.com was unavailable almost 8 hours straight last Friday (January 16).
The outage started at 5:05 a.m. CET and didn’t end until 12:50 p.m. CET (a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes). The site was completely unreachable during that time, indicating either a server or network failure.
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Posted in
Main on January 15th, 2009 by Pingdom
We all know that Wordpress is popular among bloggers, and Movable Type as well. But HOW popular? And what other platforms are being used? To find out, we went through the Technorati top 100 blogs and investigated what blog platforms they are using. It turned out to be a highly interesting survey with plenty of surprises along the way.
As a by-product we also found out some interesting things about the more popular blog networks. For example, did you know that Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media together have 22 of the top 100 blogs?
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Posted in
Main on December 15th, 2008 by Pingdom
The blog search engine Technorati suffered from both downtime and slowdown during large periods of December 12 and 13. In those two days, the Technorati website was completely unavailable for a total of more than 9 hours.
There are indications that the problems may have been caused by database issues at Technorati.
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Posted in
Main on October 21st, 2008 by Pingdom
Many of the blogs that have a huge following today go back to much more humble beginnings. This post is a look at how they got started and what they looked like in their early days, compared to today.
All of the websites presented below are among the 15 most popular blogs according to Technorati. We relied on the Internet Archive to get screenshots of the old versions of these websites.
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Posted in
Main on September 30th, 2008 by Pingdom
As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.
Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…
For example, now you can write your own guest posts.
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Posted in
Main on May 8th, 2008 by Pingdom
We started using FeedBurner just a couple of months ago. This has allowed us to get some reasonable statistics on the number of people who have subscribed to the Royal Pingdom RSS feed. We are happy to say that the numbers have been growing, slowly but steadily. Lately, our blog has started to go above [...]
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Posted in
Main on April 2nd, 2008 by Pingdom
There are a lot of bloggers out there aiming to make a living from their blogging (or at least supplement their main income a bit). In the blogging world, content is king, but there are other factors as well. One major factor is basic human impatience. If your blog loads slowly, to a lot of [...]
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Posted in
Main on July 12th, 2007 by Pingdom
Everyone wants their blog to be popular. Really popular. The first problem is of course to become really popular. It’s not an easy thing to do. The second problem comes in if you become too popular. Showing all those blog posts will soon bring your web server to its knees. But fear not, dear WordPress [...]
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Posted in
Main on June 13th, 2007 by Pingdom
After noticing that his blog was slowed down by some advertising scripts he had put in, blogger Abdylas Tynyshov (a.k.a. Ades) used Pingdom Tools to test how different advertising scripts affected the load time of his blog. Testing websites like this is one of the main reasons why we created the Full Page Test in [...]
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