Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

10 famous domains before they were big

In today’s branded world, it is almost impossible to imagine a company that does not own the domain associated with their name or brand. But several of today’s famous domains had a very different use before they were big.

For example, did you know that iCloud.com once was the personal homepage of a Japanese professor?

Minimalistic design – Amazon.it

There is almost one Amazon for every top-level domain today. Amazon.it may not be the most famous of them, but still, it’s Amazon. And before Amazon, there were Molteco.

amazon.it

Is it a brand, is it a country or is it a town? Who knows? What we do know is that Molteco clearly used the approach “less is more” when designing it’s site.

When “Android” was sci-fi – Android.com

There was a time when the word “Android” referred to a robot with a human appearance and not an operating system. At that time,  “Android Creativity” was the company behind Android.com.

Android.com

Anyone that has heard of a smartphone or a tablet can probably guess what Android.com covers today.

Share via  Dropbox Intranet mail – Dropbox.com

Sharing has never been easier, and DropBox is just one of the services you could use to share today. Or you could go back in time and share things via the Dropbox Internet/Intranet mail server.

dropbox.com

If you are to register for the service today, don’t forget to check the “System Requirements”. You may have to install Windows 95 again.

Bright and shining – Goal.com

For all you soccer lovers under the age of 20;  Goal.com did not always give us the latest news:

goal.com

The content may not be that much to look at, but someone had surely learned a thing or two about hexadecimal notation for colors to get that bright and shining background.

I, cloud – iCloud.com

Clouds have, until recently, just been something you would mention when talking about the weather. So a domain like iCloud.com may not have been so hard to come by for professor Insung Jung.

icloud.com

As almost every other i-ish domain (except iPad.com), it leads straight to Apple these days.

A custom created space – Myspace.com

Myspace may not be the biggest social network anymore, but we guess it still has more visitors than this company:

myspace.com

When your business needs “an Internet Web Page”, you now know where not to turn.

Not Microsoft’s Outlook, but Andrew’s – Outlook.com

Going from Hotmail to Outlook? Or maybe to Andrew Seybold’s Outlook.com:

outlook.com

Unfortunately, we too missed the last WDU so we can’t tell you what it was all about.

Anything at all to do with photos? – Photoshop.com

Photoshop has been around for ages, but it has always been an Adobe product, so the photoshop.com domain has not always been its home.

photoshop.com

It may not be the perfect design for a site that has anything to do with photos.

Probably not THE Walmart – Walmart.com

Even in the beginning, walmart.com was about shopping.

walmart.com

But is it really the same Walmart? The “Interesting Links” make us doubtful.

Famous domain for a not so famous cause – iPhone.com

iPhone is known for having revolutionized the mobile phones as we knew them. So what could be further from today’s iPhone.com than this?

iphone.com

We are not trying to spoil a perfectly good protest, but when you publish something on the Internet, it is likely that the ones who read it are “those who have the luxury of owning a computer”.

Other famous domains?

We found these ten examples interesting and funny, and we are sure that if we had kept on looking we had found many more. Do you have any favourites that we did not cover in this article?

Data and screenshots: Amazon.it, Android.com, Dropbox,com, goal.com, iCloud.com, iPhone.com, myspace.com, outlook.com, photoshop.com and walmart.com

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free