As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the number of Internet users has doubled in the past five years. To handle this enormous influx of users, Internet’s infrastructure needs to grow as well. The Domain Name System (DNS), a critical part of that infrastructure, has more than met the challenge.

Five years ago there were 123 DNS root server sites (the “backend” of DNS) spread out on the Internet. Today there are more than twice as many, over 300. Five years ago, 46 countries had root servers. Today, 76 have them.

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George Orwell’s arguably most famous novel, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, coined a number of phrases that are in widespread use today. One of them was “Big Brother,” an authority figure who watches every move you make, everywhere. The term has become synonymous with mass surveillance. As you can imagine, the book is easily as relevant today as it was back in 1949 when it was first published. (It’s a great read, btw.)

The usual complaints about modern-era Big Brothers – aside from that annoying reality show – tend to be targeted at initiatives to place more surveillance cameras in various locations (e.g. the camera-riddled London). Then of course there is the monitoring of our activities on the Internet by governments, ISPs and organizations with their own agendas.

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Tumblr has almost doubled in size since last fall. Back in September 2011, the blogging service hosted 28 million blogs containing a total of 10 billion blog posts. Today, Tumblr has passed 50 million blogs, and its users have produced more than 20 billion blog posts.

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Google’s Chrome web browser has become a worldwide success, but it’s more popular in some parts of the world than in others. It became the top browser in South America back in October 2011, and as of March this year it’s also become the top browser in Asia.

Up until March this year, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the most widely used browser in Asia, but now it’s finally lost its crown after a reign that has lasted at least a decade. It took Chrome 3.5 years to trump IE in Asia (Chrome launched in September 2008). It now has 36.41% of the browser market in Asia, versus IE’s 34.57%.

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As you’re probably aware, Pingdom has been growing a lot over the past couple of years, and as more and more users have joined our service, our infrastructure has grown as well. Our monitoring network now consists of 40 locations that test your sites and servers.

Starting this week, we’re going to change how these monitoring locations monitor your sites. It’s not something most of you will notice, monitoring will be as reliable as ever, but we thought it was worth a blog post explaining what we’re doing and why to avoid any potential confusion.

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How about paying almost $4,000 for a basic PC? Or $7,600 for a printer? That’s how much you would pay for some classic tech items if they were sold today with prices adjusted for inflation.

After having looked at classic hardware before here at Royal Pingdom, we now thought it would be interesting to dip into the pool of great gadgets again, this time focusing on prices.

So with the help of the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, we’ve brought prices of a few classic tech items into the current year.

As you will see, we should be very grateful for what we pay for most tech today.

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The Middle East is perhaps not what many people think of as one of the hottest telecom market in the world but new numbers by Informa Telecoms & Media may change your mind.

In total, the Middle East will see over 250 million mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012. Iran, by far the biggest market in the Middle East for mobile phone subscriptions, will account for around 90 million by end of 2011, predicted to grow to 122 million by end of 2016.

In terms of smartphones, the UAE is predicted to have over 70% smartphone penetration by 2016, up from 47% today. Compare this with the United States, with a smartphone penetration of 40% as of September 2011.

Let’s have a look at some of the other numbers to see what else is interesting.

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There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s iPad is the biggest seller in the tablet space, but we have seen many iPad competitors come out over recent months, including Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Blackberry PlayBook, Amazon Kindle Fire, and many more.

However, despite all these Android tablets, according to comScore in October 2011, 95.5% of all tablet web traffic in the U.S. comes from iPad.

That is a stunning number. So, is anyone really buying all these shipping Android tablets, and what do people do with them after they buy them? Because they don’t seem to be surfing the Web.

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And now for something short and sweet, or bittersweet if you worked at MySpace back in 2006-2007 when the social network was still going strong.

To say that Facebook stole MySpace’s thunder in those years is probably the understatement of the decade. By the end of 2008, the social media focus (and mindshare) had already shifted away from MySpace to Facebook in a massive fashion. A picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a chart.

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The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

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