Pingdom is a service measuring and tracking the uptime, downtime, and performance of websites, covering the uptime monitoring needs of 90% of the companies in the world. The Sweden based firm has been very efficient in concentrating on this narrow segment, and has been growing strongly as a result. The firm’s mission is fully focused on providing the best uptime monitoring service available. Pingdom was founded in 2005 by Sam Nurmi, who also founded and later sold Sweden’s biggest web hosting company, Loopia.
Pingdom works by monitoring websites from multiple locations globally, and in this way determining genuine downtime from routing and other connection problems. Pingdom is able to detect problems with a website pretty much the minute it happens. You as the company’s customer will then get an immediate alert by email, SMS, or Twitter for taking action. In addition, Pingdom also provides an iPhone application for monitoring your website. When a problem occurs, there are also several troubleshooting tools available to pinpoint the reason.
The beauty of the concept is that every business that has a serious online presence will need to make sure their website stays accessible every day, 24/7. Often, infrequently occurring problems can go unnoticed for too long by a firm, as the firm stays happily unaware of problems affecting access to their site on the web. These kinds of outages can cost a lot in missed opportunities and degraded goodwill. As a testimony to the firm’s focused efforts in its narrow business area, it has attracted quite a few big brands as their customers.
Pingdom has also embraced the practice of giving in their social media activities – they are actively providing interesting and conversation provoking content, and not just advertising product features. Like collecting Google facts and figures into a massive infographic and comparing Facebook’s traffic rank in the top 20 countries on the company’s blog. Pingdom also uses its Twitter stream for actively helping out customers.
