US + international: +1-212-796-6890
SE + international: +46-21-480-0920
Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).
Text and numbers are all good and well, but sometimes it’s nice to just be presented with a nice visual.
This post is full of videos of just that, interesting visualizations of data. Being the geeks we are, they’re of course all related to the Web and the Internet.
Enjoy!
Running an uptime monitoring service as we do, over time it’s become obvious to us that a large portion of website problems are caused by DNS issues, and in many cases those issues were a direct result of bad DNS settings. In other words, there is a lot of downtime and other website errors that could have been avoided if the DNS servers of that website had been correctly configured from the start.
Downtime sucks. When your website is down, it might as well be invisible. That alone should be reason enough to monitor your website’s availability, but just to really push home this point, here are another 19 excellent reasons why you should monitor your website.
DNS, the Domain Name System, is a vital part of the Internet. And since it’s such a vital part of the Internet, it’s important that websites have correct DNS settings. If they don’t, it can lead to a number of problems, one of them being downtime. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.
We here at Pingdom run a website monitoring service that tracks the uptime of tens of thousands of websites for our users, so we deal with site issues on a daily basis. Over time, it has become exceedingly clear that a large portion of the various errors we detect are caused by bad DNS settings or poorly configured DNS servers.
This is why we now are introducing an addition to our free webmaster tools: a DNS health test.
Everyone knows that the really big and popular websites have a ton of visitors. But how many? How much does it take to reach the top?
We were curious about this ourselves. We’ve all seen the almost absurd numbers involved with the very top sites (like Facebook), but what about website number 50, or 100, or 500? What does it take for a website, in terms of visitors, to reach such a ranking?
Do you want to know more about how big websites like Twitter, Facebook, Hotmail and others handle the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of visitors?
Well, you’re in luck, because many of those sites and services have engineering and/or developer blogs that share plenty of information about the challenges they have to deal with and the tools they use. This is an insider’s view that you usually can’t get anywhere else, giving us a unique view of what’s going on behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest web services.
There was a significant amount of media attention earlier this week around a report from traffic monitoring company Hitwise that claimed Facebook now has more traffic than Google in the US.
So let’s have a look at how it’s doing in the rest of the world.
When it comes to web server software, Apache has been king of the hill for a long time. It currently has about 54% of the market. This is followed by Microsoft’s IIS, with about 24% of the market. Then, surprisingly, a new contender has started to rise, and it’s coming out of Russia: nginx (pronounced “engine x”).
PageRank (PR) was Google’s original secret weapon, a scale that would rank websites based on incoming links and where those links came from. Although its relevance has arguably faded a bit over the years as Google has added more and more criteria to site rankings, it still goes hand in hand with SEO and every webmaster out there wants to have a high PR.
But do you need a high PR to have a successful site? Search rankings are one thing, but what about actual site popularity and traffic?
There are an impressive number of website analytics packages out there, with a wide range in price and features. But many of those analytics tools are only available online: you have to log in to a website to get at your data. The options for a desktop-based tool are fewer and farther between, but there are a few useful tools out there.
Check out these four options to see if a desktop application will fit the way you handle your website analytics.
