HTTP response headers are usually pretty dry reading, but once in a blue moon you do stumble upon something that makes you smile. Here are some of our favorites.

Read more

Since its creation by John Resig in 2005, jQuery has become one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries on the planet. It’s used by more than half of the top 10,000 websites in the world, and keeps getting more popular every day.

One question web developers using jQuery are faced with is how they should host the jQuery file. Should they host it themselves, or should they use one of the freely available content delivery networks (CDNs)?

Read more

We just wanted to let you know that we recently updated our iPhone and Android apps.

So what’s new in this version? Mainly two things:

• The ability to pause/unpause monitoring. We added a toggle control for this on the check info page. This can be handy if you need to do some maintenance and don’t want to trigger a lot of alerts, for example. Just don’t forget to start the monitoring back up when you’re done!
• An outage view, where you can also examine the reason behind each outage. This is the new default view when you tap on a check. Needless to say, this is great for troubleshooting on the go. Tapping on an outage will show you which monitoring locations first detected the outage, and the reason for the error (for example a connection timeout or an HTTP error code).

Read more

A really effective way to speed up a website is to add some form of caching layer in front of it. If your web server doesn’t have to keep generating the same web pages over and over, odds are things will be a lot faster for your site visitors. This is where Varnish comes in.

According to our research, 5.2% of the world’s top 10,000 websites are currently using Varnish, a popular open source HTTP accelerator (also called a reverse proxy) that acts as a caching layer between a website and its visitors.

Read more

When Google bought Urchin Software in 2005 and released its Urchin on Demand service for free to the entire Internet, the company transformed the web analytics industry forever. All of a sudden there was a powerful yet completely free option available for everyone. Webmasters have rallied to Google Analytics ever since, and as of June this year, 62.4% of the top 10,000 websites use the service.

That kind of market share is quite amazing, and it’s safe to say that Google Analytics is one of Google’s biggest triumphs. Really, the numbers speak for themselves.

Read more

We’re big fans of the JavaScript library jQuery, and it appears we are far from alone. As of June this year it’s used by 54.7% of the top 10,000 websites in the world. That’s a massive endorsement by the world’s web developers. It’s also a significant step forward from two years ago, when 28% of the sites used jQuery.

Read more

Facebook has become a huge presence on the Web. A full 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world have some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage. And if you include regular links to Facebook, the number soars up to a highly impressive 49.3%.

Now after Facebook has had its much talked-about IPO, it’s worth noting how close the social network is to becoming part of the Web’s DNA. When so many websites have some form of Facebook integration, maybe we’re already there.

Read more

Even today, in 2012, some people don’t have broadband Internet connections, relying instead on phone lines and those good old dial-up modems. By today’s standards, those connections are extremely slow. Not only is the transfer speed slow, the latency is worse too.

On top of that, today’s websites are generally not designed for such slow connections. Surfing the web on a dial-up modem today is character building. That’s what you say about excruciating, painful experiences, right?

We wanted to see just how bad the situation is today. How long do regular web pages take to load over dial-up?

Read more

Next week we’ll be switching over to a brand new control panel for the Pingdom site monitoring service. We’re calling it My Pingdom. It has a shiny new look, even easier setup, and even better troubleshooting when your site goes down.

You can learn more about it at future.pingdom.com, and a limited preview version is available at my.pingdom.com (it’s been there for a while now). That will also be the address once it’s fully live.

Read more

We have analyzed the top 10,000 websites in the world to find out what web server software they are running. Here is what we found out.

First of all, it is clear that open source software rules the roster. This largely thanks to two massively popular open source projects: The Apache web server, and the nginx web server. Together they account for at least 61% of the top 10k sites.

Read more