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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Do you run a web service or hosting company? Do you like transparency? Then this might be of interest to you.

Service status blogs are becoming increasingly common these days and are usually very appreciated by users. Look no further than Twitter’s famous status blog, or the Google Apps status page. Status blogs (or “status pages”, depending on approach) may look and work differently, but they all serve the same purpose, informing users about service issues.

Now it’s easier than ever before if you want one, or want to make your existing status blog even better.

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Sometimes you want an easy way to share your Pingdom monitoring data with others. So far we’ve had public report pages that you can use, but now we’ve added one more sharing method that is very flexible and easy to use.

Enter our new “report banners”.

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All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.

And since it is a question we can’t resist asking: how do they compare to the homepages of corporate OS giants like Microsoft and Apple? We included those in this survey so that we could answer that question as well.

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The BBC website was subjected to a DDoS attack on Thursday evening (November 6) that crippled the website’s performance significantly.

During the attack, the BBC website responded very slowly, and our monitoring shows that for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes it did not respond at all. The downtime was spread over multiple short intervals, lasting just a few minutes each time.

The attack lasted the entire evening. It started to have an effect after 5 p.m. CET and the performance was not back to normal until after 10 p.m. CET.

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High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.

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Twitter seems to be making good on their promise to improve the stability of their microblogging service, at least when it comes to the website itself (which is what we monitor here at Pingdom). Lately, their website has shown a significant improvement in both availability and response time. Is the infamous Twitter “fail whale” facing an early retirement?

We have the numbers.

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We found this on Flickr and simply had to share it with you. It’s a Pingdom response time graph for a user who switched web hosting provider, with quite a drastic effect on his load time. Courtesy of MellerTime at Flickr. Could the switch possibly have been around 4 p.m…?

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We have just released a new set of reports in the Pingdom control panel. These reports give you even more flexibility than before when viewing your uptime, downtime and response time monitoring results. Note that these new reports are still in beta and will receive some additional polish, so this is the perfect time for [...]

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Forums are a great resource, and there seems to exist at least one for every subject imaginable (yes, really). This being the web, there are of course bound to be a lot of forums that focus on webmasters and web hosting. It isn’t always easy to keep a forum running smoothly. Forum software is notoriously [...]

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