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We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.
It can’t be easy to be a web hosting company. On the Internet everybody wants a free lunch (or at least a very cheap one). And this of course includes hosting.
To prove this point, we looked at search data from Google and found something quite interesting for the term “web hosting” (using Google’s excellent Insights for Search tool).
This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.
We are not going to be able to cover everything that happens out there, so if we omit anything that you feel is important, please feel free to add this information in the comments, preferably with a link to a source (such as a news article or service status page with relevant information).
This week it’s all about social networks: Trouble at Friendster, Twitter and LinkedIn.
This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. It looks like the secret HQ of a James Bond villain.
And it is real. It is a newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).
Read the full post for plenty of more pictures and cool information.
Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).
The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.
Sometimes disagreements and conflicts spill over from real life to online, and sometimes people go completely overboard and launch cyber attacks on services or websites they dislike, doing their best to sabotage them and often causing some serious downtime.
This sabotage is often done using distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks) which send such extreme amounts of traffic to a website that it is effectively disabled.
This article takes a look at some high-profile examples of cyber attacks, how the attacked website was affected and why it was attacked (where this information is available). We also take a quick look at how these attacks are usually launched, what the long arm of the law is doing about it and how bad the punishment can actually get.
This US election, the Web was more important than ever, and this includes the presidential candidates’ websites. So how did these websites perform in the ever-important months leading up to the election? Our Pingdom monitoring results are in…
InformationWeek has managed to get an inside look at 1&1’s Lenexa, Kansas data center, built inside a former storage facility. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies in the world (arguably the largest), and this data center certainly isn’t small.
The data center has five server rooms with a total of 860 racks and can handle at least 40,000 servers.
Finding out which web hosting companies really are the largest ones can be difficult. This article takes a number of different factors into consideration to not just find out which ones are the largest today, but also which of them are growing the fastest. Today’s leader may not be tomorrow’s. When we talk about the [...]
A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it. We thought this would be interesting in relation [...]
