Our server infrastructure has a lot of work to do, it’s quite a busy bee. When you monitor the uptime and response time of as many websites and servers on the Internet as we do, and do it on a continuous basis, the numbers quickly add up. Just for fun, we thought we’d share some of these numbers with you.

First a couple of year-to-date numbers for the Pingdom monitoring network.

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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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The web browser market is an ever-changing landscape. It can sometimes be rocky ground for web designers and web developers trying to make their websites and services work for all the various browser versions available out there. It’s challenging work, to say the least.

That’s why it pays to be aware of what the web browser market looks like, and stay up to date. How many are using the various browsers out there? How many are using the latest versions? Which versions are the most common? How big an audience may you be annoying if your site isn’t perfect in a specific browser version?

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We’re happy to announce that starting today, CloudFlare users have super-easy access to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service via CloudFlare Apps. With just one click, they can set up a free Pingdom account to monitor their website.

We have to give credit to CloudFlare for encouraging independent monitoring of their service. Clearly, they have nothing to hide and want their users to stay on top of their website uptime and performance. That a service promotes transparency is always a good sign.

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As you might have noticed, we’re making a new control panel for Pingdom. You can already access parts of it either by logging in directly to it, or going via our current control panel.

We thought you might enjoy a few tips on how you can use it effectively, so let’s start with a very important subject: troubleshooting downtime. After all, once you’ve received an alert from us that your website is down, you might want to have a closer look at exactly what the problem is.

As an added benefit, much of what we tell you here below are things you can apply in the existing control panel, so you practically get two lessons for the price of one. Neat, huh?

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We know that there are approximately two billion Internet users in the world, but how are they distributed? More specifically, how are they spread over the world’s time zones? The world population isn’t spread evenly, and neither is the Internet population.

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

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We were pleasantly surprised the other day when one of our users announced that he had used our REST API to build a very nice third-party Pingdom app for Windows Phone 7. It’s called Pingdom Pulse.

The guy behind the WP7 app is Will Johnson, a developer from the UK. The app is free, looks good and runs well, so if you have a Pingdom account and a WP7 phone, check it out. It works with both free and paid Pingdom accounts.

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We just launched a sneak preview of a brand new Pingdom control panel, your interface to the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. We’re calling it My Pingdom.

It’s a work in progress and currently only the reports section is available for your perusal, but we wanted to get it out there so we could start getting feedback from you, our great users. Your feedback will help us make this new control panel as good as it can be.

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It has probably escaped no one that Amazon had several days of serious issues with its cloud hosting service last week, which took a large number of sites either fully or partly offline, including sites like Reddit, Foursquare and Quora.

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As of today, the new public reports (a.k.a. public status pages) are no longer in beta. We here at Pingdom would like to thank you all for your feedback during the beta testing period.

The old-style public reports will continue to work until May 31. After that date, they will automatically redirect to the new reports.

If you’re not already using the new style of public report (it uses a different URL than the old one), now might be a good time to switch. All the information you need is available under Public Reports in the Pingdom control panel.

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