Posted in
Main on December 1st, 2011 by Pingdom
Apache is still the undisputed king of web server software but according to the latest Netcraft Web Server Survey from November 2011, NGINX usage has grown almost 300% over the last year.
In real numbers NGINX increased from about 15 million sites a year ago to 43 million in November 2011. That’s a faster growth than any other web server software tracked by Netcraft.
Since we’re big fans of NGINX at Pingdom, we wanted to try to understand this tremendous growth, so we put some questions to Andrew Alexeev (Q&A further down). Andrew looks after Business Development and Marketing for NGINX Inc., the company formed in October this year, backed by $3 million in venture funding, with the intent to expand the open source NGINX project and explore commercial opportunities.
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Posted in
Main on October 12th, 2011 by Pingdom
In October, Windows 7 usage has for the first time surpassed Windows XP usage globally according to statistics from StatCounter. In other words, Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world.
This has been a long time coming. Windows XP has been at the top for eons (it launched 10 years ago, and once established, didn’t let go). Windows Vista never managed to threaten XP, so it wasn’t until Windows 7 came around that a shift really started to happen.
And that shift has happened fast. Windows 7 launched in October of 2009, then…
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Posted in
Main on October 5th, 2011 by Pingdom
At the recent F8 conference Facebook revealed that they now have 800 million active users. Europe, with Russia included, has a population of 727 million. We now have a social network that is so large that it could fill up a major world region with people and still have some to spare (this “spare” being twice the size of Canada’s entire population).
Another cool comparison is that Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.
For fun, here are some other size comparisons you can make.
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Posted in
Main on August 26th, 2011 by Pingdom
In just a couple of years, Google Chrome has firmly established itself as a web browser to be reckoned with. Where once you spoke of Internet Explorer and Firefox as the two big ones, these days the duo has become a trio. The browser wars are back. Chrome has started to edge out Firefox in some countries, and as you will see in this article, there are actually countries where it’s already become number one.
This is where South America comes into the picture. Nowhere is Chrome more successful than in that part of the world.
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Posted in
Main on January 12th, 2011 by Pingdom
What happened with the Internet in 2010?
How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.
We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.
Prepare for a good kind of information overload. 
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Posted in
Main on December 23rd, 2010 by Pingdom
Happy Holidays everyone!
Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.
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Posted in
Main on December 17th, 2010 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on November 12th, 2010 by Pingdom
How fast are Internet connections across the world? How fast are they in your country?
This article examines the real-world connection speeds for people in the top 50 countries on the Internet, i.e. the countries with the most Internet users.
This list of countries ranges from China at number 1 with 420 million Internet users, and Denmark at number 50 with 4.75 million Internet users.
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Posted in
Main on November 5th, 2010 by Pingdom
Web developers fight a constant struggle: They want to use modern web browser features, but they also need to take browser adoption into consideration. If a large portion of their users run older versions of browsers, web developers will be limited in what they can accomplish.
With this in mind, we decided to find out how many people are running the latest version of their browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera.
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Posted in
Main on September 29th, 2010 by Pingdom
Enormous amounts of email circulate the Internet every day, there can be no doubt about that. But how does the amount of email compare with that of traditional mail, also known as “snail mail”?
It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?
We’ve done the research and done the math, so look no further than the small infographic we’ve put together here below, a comparison of email and snail mail volumes in the United States.
Enjoy!
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