Do you run a web service or hosting company? Do you like transparency? Then this might be of interest to you.

Service status blogs are becoming increasingly common these days and are usually very appreciated by users. Look no further than Twitter’s famous status blog, or the Google Apps status page. Status blogs (or “status pages”, depending on approach) may look and work differently, but they all serve the same purpose, informing users about service issues.

Now it’s easier than ever before if you want one, or want to make your existing status blog even better.

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Downtime sucks. When your website is down, it might as well be invisible. That alone should be reason enough to monitor your website’s availability, but just to really push home this point, here are another 19 excellent reasons why you should monitor your website.

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Do you have a website? Do you like knowing that it’s working ok? Pingdom exists for this very reason, to alert you when your site has downtime, so you can fix it. With this in mind we have released a new application that we call the Pingdom Desktop Notifier, which sits in your Windows system tray.

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When Apple introduced push notifications to the iPhone this summer, we immediately thought of what a great match it would be for our monitoring service. After all, the main point of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service is getting alerts when your website or server goes down.

So, when we started work on version 2.0 of our iPhone app, this was one of our top priorities. Now the new version is here, with push notifications, graphs, and more.

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Last week we made it possible for you to get Pingdom alerts via Twitter, giving you one more way to know if your website is down.

Initially we sent you alerts from a dedicated “alert account”, @pingdomalert, but some people also wanted to be able to have these alerts sent via their own Twitter accounts instead of TO them, so now we have added that functionality as well (i.e. alerts from Pingdom as your own status updates).

Let’s have a look at the different ways people are using these alerts.

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Yesterday we announced that you can now get Pingdom alerts via Twitter.

So how do you activate those alerts? We have made it very easy for you:

1. Add your Twitter username to your contact(s).
2. Select “Twitter” as notification method when editing/adding a site for monitoring.

Alerts via Twitter is an excellent complement to email and SMS alerts. It’s yet another way you can get alerted by Pingdom when your websites or servers go down.

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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).

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A huge number of blogs use Feedburner to syndicate their RSS feeds. Since the service was launched in 2004, it’s pretty much become the de facto standard for this. With so many bloggers relying on Feedburner, reliability and performance is of course extremely important. RSS feeds, just like websites, need to be available all the time on the Web.

We have tested Feedburner’s RSS feed performance and uptime.

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We’ve been offering the possibility to monitor DNS servers for a while. So we were glad to see an article about DNS services and Pingdom’s DNS check functionality done by John Philip Green, CTO of Savvica.

Using Pingdom he evaluated the performance of DNS hosting providers to use as a guideline for selecting a new provider.

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Is the Internet rapidly becoming less of a safe, free and open place for our ideas, opinions and communication? One could convincingly argue that it is.

Here is what the situation looks like today, with some countries attempting to control the Internet and many monitoring everything on it. We also discuss what you can (and should?) do about it.

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