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.

Trailblazers, creatives and innovators have taken the Internet to where it is today and made it an essential part of our everyday lives. We have selected a number of interesting “firsts” from the history of the Internet (and the Web) for your reading pleasure.

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Facebook has announced that it now has 400 million active users. Just one year ago Facebook had 150 million users, so 2009 was an incredible year for the social media giant.

There can be no doubt that Facebook is pretty much unstoppable at the moment, a real juggernaut. For some perspective on Facebook’s amazing growth, we have put together this infographic. We hope you’ll enjoy it!

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you’ll know that last week Apple announced the iPad, its new tablet device. Reactions have been a mixed bag, and a storm of discussion has swept through the blogosphere about various features the iPad should or shouldn’t have had.

One of the main complaints so far has been the iPad’s lack of multitasking. (To be precise, multitasking is a bit of a misnomer here; the iPhone OS has multitasking. What people really mean is only allowing one app at a time to run.)

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The tech industry is littered with billionaires. We all enjoy a good income, but some clearly have earned more than others. Much, much more. The question is, how much money do the really big names in tech actually have?

To find out, we went through the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, and filtered out the people who work within the tech field, or more specifically: IT.

So here they are, the 20 richest Americans in tech today.

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