We have surveyed the availability of the official websites of US presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Ron Paul from February 15 to April 7 (using Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service). These websites are an important medium for the candidates, where press releases and information about the candidates can be presented, and it is therefore critical that these websites are stable and always available on the internet.

Barack Obama’s website suffered no outages during the monitored time period, and neither did John McCain’s. Ron Paul’s website was only unavailable for a mere five minutes. In contrast, Hillary Clinton’s website was unavailable for a total of 29 hours and 50 minutes. The majority of that time came during four days in March.

Hillary Clinton’s website suffered from frequent loading problems during the period of March 20-23. The problems started 3 p.m. EST on March 20, and didn’t stop until 5:30 p.m. EST on March 23. During this time, the website was unavailable for a total of more than 27 hours. There was no single long outage, but a continuous series of shorter intervals where the website simply did not respond. As many as 40% of all requests to the website failed during this period.

The reason for the problem is unclear. The website could be reached, but did not respond. This could be due to the website being overloaded by an excessive amount of visitor traffic, or some other internal performance problem.

It is very unusual to see this extent of downtime for such a high-profile website. The problems started soon after the US National Archives released the 11,000 pages of records that detailed Hillary Clinton’s time as a first lady, but this may be a coincidence.

About the survey:

The websites were tested from Pingdom’s monitoring network, which has servers both in the US and Europe. Any website issues were always confirmed from two different geographic locations before a website was considered unavailable. Tests were performed every 5 minutes, around the clock.

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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