Favourite website down? Mr Uptime will help

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 02:17

Your IT - Home IT

Pingdom, an Internet monitoring service, has produced an extension for Firefox that will remind users when a visited website that is down comes back on the air.

Pingdom spokesman, Peter Alguacil, said "If you are a frequent visitor of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, you will know that it is common that listed websites often can’t handle all the traffic they are getting and start failing (the Slashdot or Digg effect). We were tired of missing interesting websites because of this, so we developed Mr Uptime as a solution to the problem. Mr Uptime for Firefox lets you add a problematic website for monitoring, and when it works again, Mr Uptime will let you know. In the meantime you can just keep on surfing the web as usual."

Sam Nurmi, CEO of Pingdom, added “With our experience in uptime monitoring, we are well aware of how common downtime and website problems are on the Internet." He claimed that  “the rapid success of Mr Uptime proves what we were convinced of all along, that there are a lot of frustrated people out there who have frequent problems with unavailable websites and find a tool like this really useful.”

According to Netcraft there are 52 million active websites on the Internet Pingdom says that, from its survey results, it estimates that the 52 million websites have about 12,000 years of downtime each month and that the average website downtime per month is two hours.

Nurmi said the product had been developed for Firefox "because it is developer friendly, cross-platform, and has a huge community of users that are always hungry for new, useful extensions."

Mr Uptime can be downloaded at no charge from mruptime.pingdom.com . It checks the problem site every five minutes for the first 60 minutes, every 10 minutes for the next 120 minute, every 15 minutes for the next 180 minutes, every 30 minutes for the next 240 minutes and every 60 minutes after that.