LiveJournal was unavailable for 2 hours and 45 minutes yesterday, Tuesday, while the social network migrated to a new server facility.

The migration seems to have started just after 5 p.m. CET (11 a.m. US EST), which is when the site went down.

Directly following the migration, the website was significantly slower than normal for some time, something which was also explained as a side effect of the migration on the LiveJournal status page:

LiveJournal was down today for a period of time due to migration to a new server facility. We’re back now. As the site comes back up pages may load slowly; this is expected and should resolve within the next few hours. If you are seeing this page instead of the normal www.livejournal.com site, then your local machine or DNS server is caching old information. Please try rebooting your machine to fix the problem. If that does not work, you should either contact your ISP or wait for their DNS servers to get updated.

It took approximately eight hours before the website’s performance was back to normal.

LiveJournal normally has excellent availability and has a 99.87% uptime so far in 2008 (a total of 10 hours of downtime). Before the downtime yesterday the site had a 99.90% uptime (reaching the coveted “three nines”). It will be interesting to see how LiveJournal will perform in their new data center.

The data in this article is from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. The load time in the graph refers to the time it took to contact the site and download the HTML page only, not including images or other external elements.

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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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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