I stumbled upon httparchive.org last month and I think anyone concerned with the performance of his website should take a look at it. It will give you a good idea of the current status of the web. There are some pretty interesting figures on it. The best way to describe the site is by quoting the title on their homepage “TheHTTP Archive tracks how the Web is built.” As simple as that.

The averages on that site are calculated by using raw data from all the sites listed in Alexa 500, Alexa US 500, Alexa 10,000, Fortune 500, Global 500 and Quantcast10K. To get accurate data each site is loaded 9 times. Then the data is fed and parsed to the database. What you get are some pretty interesting figures.

“We want Facebook to use 100% renewable energy” - Ironically, this is the name of a group on Facebook. It is a Greenpeace initiative which started back in February 2011. The group has grown dramatically in just under 2 months. Currently, there are over 300,000 people supporting the initiative.

Daniel Kessler of Greenpeace was quoted saying "Facebook, by opening this center, is sending a signal: We're not quite done with coal yet." Greenpeace and Change both called out Facebook to use clean renewable energy and avoid coal. Facebook’s decision to build and operate its new data center is mostly the reason behind the campaign. The data center, located in Prineville will be powered by Pacific Power. The power service agreement is already in place.

Every modern website relies on stable and well written databases. It is impossible to find a large-scale website not implementing one or more database systems.

This month, we’ve detected a high increase in response time for one of the sites we monitor. It is not a particularly large site; however it is one that relies on fast navigation. On average, the website used to load in about 3 seconds. One morning it went up to 10 seconds only for the site to begin to load. This is a good time to say that it is always advisable to test out new designs and functionality.

It seems that Skype have done it again. Yes, that’s right, they’re down. Just a couple of minutes ago their site stopped working and their services have been shaky all day.

This is what their site looked like several minutes ago.

There are two great WordPress plugins that everyone should know about. The first one is called Dropbox CDN. “Dropbox” as in “Dropbox - the personal file backup service, helping me work on my files from my PC and Mobile Phone”.

Dropbox CDN (Content Delivery Network) enables you to host your WordPress theme CSS, JS and images on Dropbox. This is huge! Setting up additional hosting space involves extra costs, time to manage, backups. A lot of hassle! With this plug in you enjoy all this for free. The reason why this is so great is that common bloggers can now have their blog load faster and be viewed by more people at once. Using CDN is listed as a great practice by Yslow, no matter the scale of you online presence. It is worth it to get a Dropbox account only for the sake of using this plugin. If you are not too happy with your hosting provider, or you are using a free service, this is a good moment to try out the plugin to increase your website’s performance.