If Mother Nature has anything to say, there simply are some places where you shouldn’t place a data center. Do you really want to have your servers where there is a high risk of earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes? We didn’t think so…

It seems that the U.S. is “blessed” not only with large areas where the likelihood of earthquakes is very high, but also with some very harsh weather conditions in the form of hurricanes (no one is going to forget Katrina) and tornadoes, the most violent weather phenomenon in nature. Power outages, breakdown of infrastructure and loss of lives follow in the tracks of these hazardous monstrosities of nature.

We decided to look at heat maps for earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes in the U.S. to see exactly where the danger areas were located. In addition to that we also composited them to see get the full picture.

States with large areas where there is either a very high risk of hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes are California, Florida, Washington, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico.

If your biggest worry is weather, Florida has a very high risk of both hurricanes and tornadoes. If your biggest worry is earthquakes, California has been waiting for The Big One for quite some time now (hopefully not this bad, though). Silicon Valley is resting on wobbly ground.

There are a few areas in Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Texas where none of the three heat maps overlap. There may of course be other dangers aside from those we listed here.

We are not saying that everyone should move to Montana, but if you take earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes into account, you might want to keep your data center (or servers in general) outside the “red zones” of the map.

Sources: Data from U.S. Geological Survey, National Hurricane Center and National Climatic Data Center. Heat maps can be found here: Earthquake heat map, hurricane heat map, tornado heat map.

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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