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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Even though consumer spending this upcoming holiday season may be “careful and controlled,” there’s no doubt that we’ll be struck by the spirit of giving again. If you’re a retailer – online or offline – by all accounts, customers will this year use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to find your store and your products, more than they have before. So get ready, build a mobile web site if you don’t have one or improve the one you already have.

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Valentine’s Day is a great day for any vendor selling flowers. Over the years, a large number of websites selling flowers have sprung up, and as you might expect, many of these websites are flooded by eager shoppers on February 14 wanting to buy flowers and gifts for their loved ones.

This is big business. Americans are expected to spend $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts this year.

Now here is the catch. Every year, some of these websites won’t be prepared to handle the increase in visitor traffic and as a result they slow down significantly, or even crash under the pressure.

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Is Facebook taking the first steps towards making itself an internet-wide payment platform?

You may know that the company is working on something it calls Facebook Credits (it’s in beta). You can buy Facebook Credits with a credit card or Paypal, and then use these credits as a currency when buying virtual items from applications on the Facebook platform (Facebook apps). A number of apps already use it.

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It used to be that you’d pay a significant price premium for a slim ultraportable laptop – machines that were smaller and lighter than typical 5-6lb laptops. In the days before netbooks, they were really your only option for getting a thin and light laptop. But now that netbooks have carved out a segment of cheap and portable computers in the $200-$500 range, the ultraportables needed to adapt as well.

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People are getting used to broadband connections, more powerful web browsers, and a speedier web experience in general. A new study shows how the expectations of Internet users have changed significantly over the last couple of years. We expect websites to be a lot faster.

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As you may know, PayPal suffered from downtime yesterday. Overall, the problems lasted approximately 4.5 hours before being fully resolved. Since a significant number of e-commerce sites and online services handle some or all of their transactions through PayPal, how much money did the PayPal outage end up costing its users?

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Now that the computer industry has delivered what the users wanted – less capacity and less size at a lower price – the popularity of miniature laptops, netbooks, just keeps on growing.

Their minuscule size may actually cause us to regard our laptops as stationary and our netbooks as our main companions. We checked out some nifty new netbook habits (as actually exercised by an IT-professional friend of ours).

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The website of the UK bookstore Blackwell was unavailable for more than 7 hours this Wednesday, December 10. Blackwell is the largest academic bookseller in the UK, and one of the first to start selling books online.

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This is a weekly recurring post about noteworthy incidents on the Internet. This includes for example general network issues, ISP problems and downtime for well-known websites. It may be things that have been detected by us here at Pingdom, or written about by others.

As you perhaps noticed we didn’t have a summary post last week (due to time constraints here at Pingdom), so this time we will cover the last two weeks.

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