In 2008 the stock market fell into shambles, the real estate market tumbled, big companies announced big layoffs, VC investors became more careful, and the entire world economy went downhill. It’s enough to put a sour face on the most optimistic person.

But now contrast this with what happened with the Internet in 2008:

• The number of websites increased by 20%.
• The number of domain names increased by 19%.
• Not to mention that there were more than 1.4 billion people on the Internet, a number that will keep growing.

So, while everything else shrinks and decreases, the Internet just keeps growing. It probably isn’t growing as fast as it would if the overall world economy was blossoming, but it IS growing at a healthy rate.

This would indicate that the Internet as a whole operates on a separate level from the general economy.

Cut back on the doom and gloom, will you?

Things simply are not as bleak as you might imagine from watching and reading the News. And we are speaking from our own experience here, as a team of Internet entrepreneurs that it is going well for.

We are frankly a bit tired of the overly pessimistic picture that is being painted every day in the news, at least as it concerns our part of the world: the Internet. By permeating the image of financial doom and gloom, without any counterbalance, this kind of reporting may actually be making things worse by scaring consumers from consuming.

We’re not saying that the media should stop reporting on the recession, but rather that perhaps it’s going a bit overboard.

More people, more opportunities

If you liken the Internet to a market place, there are now more and more people in it. Their wallets may be a bit tighter than they were a year ago, but there are more of them. There is plenty of opportunity for businesses to thrive.

In other words, don’t let the recession (or watching the News) scare you away from doing business on the Internet. On the contrary, right now it might be the best place to be.

(If you’re interested in more 2008 Internet numbers, check out this post from last week.)

Photo by Phil Romans.

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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