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.

Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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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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