As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.

Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…

Write your own guest posts

Aside from all the great comments we’re getting from you, our readers, you can now also contribute to the blog by writing your own guest posts if you have something interesting to share.

It can be short and sweet or long and detailed. You decide.

We welcome any content along the lines of what we tend to cover. In other words, subjects like Web 2.0, Web development, the Internet, service outages, things to do with Web hosting and datacenters, and so on.

Just press the big button in the right column to get started.

Of course, we won’t just accept just any content. Ultimately, the posts have to be approved by us here at Pingdom before they are posted.

Four new content categories

As you can see, we have sorted all content into four new categories:

• Main – This is the main stream of articles from us.
• Pingdom – Posts about the Pingdom service, for example about new features.
• Outages – Posts about website downtime and other incidents on the Internet. These posts can often be of a shorter nature.
• Guest posts – As we mentioned above, you can now post your own guest posts, long or short.

Guest posts and outages are visible in a separate field to the right of the Main stream. Just click on them to read the full post.

Let us know what you think

So, what do you think about the new design? Let us know in the comments!

Before and after…

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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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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