This US election, the Web was more important than ever, and this includes the presidential candidates’ websites. So how did these websites perform in the ever-important months leading up to the election? Our Pingdom monitoring results are in…

Obama’s website

Barack Obama’s website had an impressive 100% uptime in the six months leading up to the election (in other words, no downtime at all). His technical staff has obviously done a good job running his website.

Obama’s website uses a web server software that presents itself as “PWS.” Considering that the website’s content is hosted by the Panther Express CDN we assume this stands for Panther Web Server and not the old pre-IIS Microsoft Personal Web Server…

McCain’s website

John McCain’s website managed a respectable 99.96% uptime in the six months leading up to the election, with just under two hours of combined downtime. It was never unavailable more than 25 minutes at a time.

McCain’s website uses the Microsoft IIS 6.0 web server and is hosted at Smartech.

Election night

Both websites handled election night (and day) without incident even though “election-related” traffic was bound to be significantly higher than normal (numbers from Akamai confirm this). We could see a slight increase in response time from Obama’s website, but nothing serious.

It might be worth mentioning that while Hillary Clinton was still in the race, her website had problems on several occasions. We’re not saying that this affected the outcome of her struggle with Obama, but it certainly didn’t help.

Good uptime requires two things, a good web hosting company and a skilled webmaster to maintain the site. Both Obama and McCain’s staff have done a good job, although Obama’s perfect website uptime is hard to beat.

The monitoring referred to in this article was performed by the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

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.

Read more

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!

Read more

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”.

Read more

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.)

Read more

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.

Read more