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Here’s a little-known fact: Even when your hosting provider says it has provided 100% uptime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your site hasn’t had any downtime.
Why is that? Because many hosting providers calculate their uptime in ways that aren’t intuitive from a customer perspective, ways that sometimes exclude certain downtime.
Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.
Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!
This is a guest post by Zoe Archer from the web hosting company UK2.
Every day, techies around the world are thinking of new ways to make data storage facilities a little bit more awesome.
Whilst some look awesome others are focused on top-notch security, and I wanted to take the opportunity to share some of our favorites with the Royal Pingdom readers.
We got tired of not having a good cheat sheet at hand to convert uptime percentages to downtime and vice versa, so we made one. Hopefully you will find it useful (I know we will).
You can download the PDF version here.
Print it out and use it as a reference when you need to quickly check how much downtime in a month 99.5% uptime actually allows for (just an example). It’s very handy. All information on just one page!
You’ll also find a smaller version inside this post, for your convenience.
The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
If you’re not used to thinking in terms of website availability and reliability, we hope that the insights below may help you to a greater understanding of the factors you should keep in mind when selecting a quality hosting company.
Considering that we specialize in website and server monitoring, we tend to think about these issues all day long, all year long. Several people here at Pingdom also have plenty of experience from having worked in the web hosting industry. This means that we have both the insider’s and outsider’s perspective on web hosting, so we figured we were in a good position to share some insights about web hosting that many people aren’t aware of.
The video-sharing site Revver has been having some major stability problems for a while now.
On November 1, Revver told TechCrunch that they were migrating to a new service provider:
Greenspan checked in and says they are in the middle of major migration from a CDN/provider to a tier 1 & top technology provider which “should make the quality of Revver videos displayed better then ever” (could take a few days).
The question is how well that migration has gone.
Our monitoring reveals that in the past month, the Revver website has been unavailable for a total of almost 24 hours. In just the last week, it has been down for more than 6 hours (including a 5-hour outage on January 17).
CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are becoming increasingly popular. The obvious benefit is that they can help websites to give end users a speedier web surfing experience, but there is also another very positive side effect for the entire Internet, and it will become more noticeable the more common CDNs become.
The positive side effect is this: More CDN usage means less load on the Internet backbone.
Why? It all comes down to how most CDNs work.
Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.
First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!
We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.
