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 exp ...

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

company launched in

Stockholm Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...

and later acquired by the

Austin Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

-based

SolarWinds SolarWinds Corporation is an American company that develops software for businesses to help manage their networks, systems, and information technology infrastructure. It is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with sales and product development offi ...

. 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 154,049. Västerås ...

, Sweden, but only became popular in 2007. The

company was founded by the

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

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''; sign: kr; code: SEK) is the official currency of the Kingdom of Sweden. Both the ISO code "SEK" and currency sign "kr" are in common use; the former precedes or follows the value, the latter usually follows it b ...

. 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

for $103 million. In May 2017, SolarWinds acquired the

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-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 an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

. 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 an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...

. 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 have continued to the present d ...

'' 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