The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.

Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.

In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.

Above: Just imagine the go-between Apple Push Notification Service failing…

Apple not only has to make sure that notifications are delivered, it has to make sure that your iPhone gets them in a timely manner. The real-time demands of the new feature may reveal weaknesses in Apple’s backend infrastructure.

A scalability challenge for Apple

Considering that the push feature is set to become highly popular and will be used by a lot of iPhone applications, this will result in an abundance of push notifications that have to pass through Apple’s servers. Apple will have to make sure its service can scale to handle this additional stress on its systems.

Remember that Apple had significant problems when it launched the MobileMe service (as Steve Jobs admitted). The push notification service is essentially a new web service, so hopefully Apple has learnt from past mistakes and has its backend infrastructure well prepared.

Developer trust

If Apple fails to provide reliable push notifications, even just intermittently, it will result in some serious trust issues from third-party iPhone developers.

While a few delayed (or even worse, undelivered) notifications may not be a big deal for many applications, it will be absolutely critical for some applications that notifications are delivered reliably and on time.

For example, we’ll be looking into using push notifications for our own Pingdom iPhone application down the line, so reliable notifications will be important to us. In our case it would be alerts that your website has gone down, information you would be pretty upset about missing or getting late. We’re sure there are plenty of other applications where the damage done by missed notifications would be significant as well.

In other words, it becomes a matter of credibility and trust, and Apple is going to have to earn it.

On the plus side, Apple is planning ahead

Let’s face it, the engineers at Apple must be well aware of the challenges they are facing. We just hope that they are able to deliver. We love the iPhone (most of us have one), and we want this to be a successful feature launch.

Thankfully it seems that Apple is not resting on its laurels. One good sign that Apple is taking some serious steps in bettering its infrastructure is the recently announced plan for a new billion-dollar data center the United States.

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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