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.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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