Apache has been the most widely used web server on the Internet since the early days of the Web. It still is. The second-most popular web server has been, and still is, Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, IIS. But Microsoft’s web server is now losing ground.

It wasn’t always like this. For quite some time, IIS was gaining ground on Apache, but the tide changed in 2007. Since then Apache has recovered much of its previous dominance, reaching a 65% market share, while the market share for IIS has dwindled below 16%, less than half of what it used to be. That’s a pretty steep drop, bringing the IIS market share back to what it was in 1997, 14 years ago.

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You’ve been asking for it, ladies and gentlemen, and now you have it: a Pingdom app for Android.

Just like our iPhone app, the Pingdom Android app is an excellent companion to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. It lets you connect to your Pingdom account to view the status of the servers and websites you’re monitoring, and also supports alerts via push notifications.

The app is free, and works together with all types of Pingdom accounts (including free accounts).

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Running an uptime monitoring service as we do, over time it’s become obvious to us that a large portion of website problems are caused by DNS issues, and in many cases those issues were a direct result of bad DNS settings. In other words, there is a lot of downtime and other website errors that could have been avoided if the DNS servers of that website had been correctly configured from the start.

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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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DNS, the Domain Name System, is a vital part of the Internet. And since it’s such a vital part of the Internet, it’s important that websites have correct DNS settings. If they don’t, it can lead to a number of problems, one of them being downtime. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.

We here at Pingdom run a website monitoring service that tracks the uptime of tens of thousands of websites for our users, so we deal with site issues on a daily basis. Over time, it has become exceedingly clear that a large portion of the various errors we detect are caused by bad DNS settings or poorly configured DNS servers.

This is why we now are introducing an addition to our free webmaster tools: a DNS health test.

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At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

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Do you want to know more about how big websites like Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and others handle the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of visitors?

Well, you’re in luck, because many of those sites and services have engineering and/or developer blogs that share plenty of information about the challenges they have to deal with and the tools they use. This is an insider’s view that you usually can’t get anywhere else, giving us a unique view of what’s going on behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest web services.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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Considering that we here at Pingdom work with uptime issues daily (as you tend to do when you run an uptime monitoring service), we thought the latest XKCD comic strip was hilarious.

For those who don’t know about it, XKCD is a very popular online comic by Randall Munroe about geeky subjects like math, tech, and so on. If you’re not already a fan, check it out.

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Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.

According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.

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