Pingdom Adds Twitter Support, Web Hosts Beware

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Uptime monitoring service Pingdom now supports alerts via Twitter, which means that you could get tweets when your site goes down. This is great since it offers realtime public information about downtime, and puts more pressure on the web hosts. After all, if you’re an open customer of Host X, then tweets about your site going up and down all the time will hurt their brand and hopefully force them to try harder.

People already search Twitter for information about various service outages, and for those who choose to send out their Pingdom alerts publicly on Twitter this will now add more information to that. We hope this will lead to more facts and less speculation.

Transparency, gotta love it! So now when tdhedengren.com or tdh.me fails, you know you can blame Media Temple, and when tdh.se is down you should bitch to Binero.

Get your own free Pingdom monitoring account to try it out. Just add Twitter in your site settings within the account.

Which URL Shortener Should You Rely On?

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Picking the right URL shortener for your links is obviously important, especially now that the fact that they might not be around for as long as you might like has dawned on people. Naturally you should roll your own, but failing that, it might be interesting to know that Bit.ly and Ow.ly are the most reliable ones. At least according to a reliability report from Pingdom. I must say, I was a bit surprised to see Ow.ly up on top, it has had some downtime in the past but have obviously got its act together. In fact, it was the only one with 100% uptime.

Be sure to read the whole thing. It is pretty interesting after all.

Monitor Your Blog with Pingdom for Free

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Pingdom is a widely used service that monitors uptime and notifies you whenever a site goes down, as well as gives you the data you need to whine at your webhost’s 99.99% uptime guarantees whenever they fail to meet their promise. Up until now, it has been a paid service, but now you can get an account for free.

Pingdom Free has all the features of our paid account types. The only limitation is that you can only monitor one website or server, but that should be enough for a lot of bloggers and hobbyist webmasters out there.

You also get 20 SMS alerts for free as well, which is nice. Naturally, you can upgrade your account to monitor more sites and get more SMS alerts (email is free) and so on whenever you like. Which of course is the whole idea.

Give it a go, free is the best price ever and I can, as a user, honestly say that Pingdom is great. Particularly when you don’t hear from them…!

Pingdom Says Feedburner’s Got 99.94% Availability

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FeedBurner LogoFeedburner, the RSS feed service that Google now owns, is both loved and hated in the blogosphere. Some swear by it, others at it, but more importantly, a great many of us use it to get proper stats and whatnot. Every now and then there’s buzz around feeds being unavailable, but I must say that an uptime of 99.94% doesn’t sound too shabby. Sure, could be better, but still.

Check out the Pingdom report on the matter, along with details on how the tests were performed, along with this conclusion:

We have to say that Feedburner definitely gets a passing grade, although both uptime and performance has room for improvement. Google says it’s still working on improving Feedburner behind the scenes, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months.

Do you use Feedburner? Why or why not?

Are You Using Google Analytics? Is Your Code Up To Date?

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A survey on 10,000 of the “top websites on the Internet” (according to Alexa) done by Pingdom reveals that a whopping 40% of the Google Analytics users still use the old tracking code, known as urchin.js. This script still works, but it might not in the near future.

“The information we are getting from Google is that urchin.js will be decommissioned sometime this summer,” says Julien Coquet from LBi, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

When we asked Julien what will happen once urchin.js is decommissioned, his guess was that it will eventually start returning a 404 error (file not found) and therefore stop registering traffic.

There’s really no reason to use the old urchin.js script, the new one (known as ga.js if I’m not mistaken) is faster and has more features. If you’re a Google Analytics user, you really should check what version you’re using, and update the code if it is pointing to a file called urchin.js.

WordPress Rules the Technorati Top 100, TypePad Too

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Pingdom took a look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs to see what blogging platform was the most widely used one. I can’t say I’m the least surprised to see that WordPress finished at the top. Looking at the self-hosted blogs, 27 (ie 27%) run WordPress, 12 rolls on Movable Type, 8 are custom made, and 4 use Drupal. Looking at hosted blog platform, TypePad finishes at the top with 16 blogs, Blogsmith rolls 14, WordPress.com only has 5, and 3 use Blogger. Worth noting is that Gawker Media blogs has their own platform, and it isn’t listed, whereas AOL Weblogs Inc, use Blogsmith.

For even more number crunching and graphs, check out the excellent run-through at the Royal Pingdom blog, including a full list.

Technorati Top 100 Blogs are Dial-Up Unfriendly

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Pingdom, the uptime service, recently published a report analyzing the load size of the Technorati Top 100 blogs. While the report isn’t focusing on individual blogs, it is still an interesting read.

The one thing that stands out is the massive size of the front pages of these blogs. The average size is a whopping 934 kB, and 35% had a front page larger than 1 MB. This effectively locks out dial-up users.

Why would you decide to do that? [Read more…]