Pingdom AB is a Swedish

website monitoring Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a website or web application as expected. Website monitoring are often used by businesses to ensure website uptime, performance, and functionality is as ex ...

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

company launched in

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

and later acquired by the

Austin, Texas Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...

–based SolarWinds. The company releases annual reports on global internet use, which are frequently cited in academic publications and by media organizations as a source of Internet-related statistics.

History

Pingdom was launched in 2005 in

Västerås Västerås () is a city in central Sweden on the shore of Mälaren, Lake Mälaren in the province of Västmanland, west of Stockholm. The city had a population of 127,799 at the end of 2019, out of the municipal total of 158,653, over 100,000 mo ...

, Sweden, but only became popular in 2007. The

company was founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Sam Nurmi, who had previously founded Loopia Web Hosting and who would go on to found Dooer. As of 2012, the company reported sales of 22.5 million

Swedish kronor The krona (; plural: ''kronor''; currency sign, sign: kr; ISO 4217, code: SEK) is the currency of Sweden. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use for the krona; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usual ...

. By 2014, the company, then owned by the private equity firm Nurmi Drive controlled by its CEO, reported 500,000 customers in 211 countries and employed 30 people. In June 2014, the software company was acquired by the

-based software developer SolarWinds for $103 million. In May 2017, SolarWinds acquired the

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-based company Scout Server Monitoring and merged the software with Pingdom.

Product and reports

Pingdom has servers located in several countries used to measure the latency of the websites it monitors. It can report whether a website is down due to network splits or failure in DNS servers. Pingdom functions by regularly accessing websites to check whether the site is accessible to users. The software will continuously monitor the website at higher rates until it determines that it is again operational. Pingdom also generates a report detailing how long the site was down. The user receives an email notifying them of any downtime as soon as it occurs and again when it ends. The monitoring tool can also determine how long it takes a website to load fully, how many files it constitutes, and the number of scripts and images required to load. Pingdom publishes reports on global Internet use and country-specific data on visitors to popular websites like

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. The report also includes data on the location of the hosts for many of the most visited websites in the world as determined by

Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was a web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco, California. It was founded as an independent company by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat in 1996. Alexa provided web traffic data, global rankings, and other info ...

. In 2012, Pingdom was able to determine that about 43.1% of the top 1 million websites were hosted in the United States, compared to the 31.3% hosted in all of Europe. The company also publishes ''Royal Pingdom'', a blog on a variety of Internet-related topics. ''Royal Pingdom'' is frequently cited in academic publications and by media organizations as a source of statistics on a variety of websites.

Reception

In its September 2017 review of the service, ''

PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues . Overview ''PC Mag ...

'' praised the software as "fast and comprehensive", pointing out that "the only downside is that all this goodness is wrapped in a difficult interface that requires a steep learning curve to leverage."

References

External links

* {{Official website, pingdom.com 2005 establishments in Sweden Website monitoring software