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.

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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