This US election, the Web was more important than ever, and this includes the presidential candidates’ websites. So how did these websites perform in the ever-important months leading up to the election? Our Pingdom monitoring results are in…
Obama’s website
Barack Obama’s website had an impressive 100% uptime in the six months leading up to the election (in other words, no downtime at all). His technical staff has obviously done a good job running his website.
Obama’s website uses a web server software that presents itself as “PWS.” Considering that the website’s content is hosted by the Panther Express CDN we assume this stands for Panther Web Server and not the old pre-IIS Microsoft Personal Web Server…
McCain’s website
John McCain’s website managed a respectable 99.96% uptime in the six months leading up to the election, with just under two hours of combined downtime. It was never unavailable more than 25 minutes at a time.
McCain’s website uses the Microsoft IIS 6.0 web server and is hosted at Smartech.
Election night
Both websites handled election night (and day) without incident even though “election-related” traffic was bound to be significantly higher than normal (numbers from Akamai confirm this). We could see a slight increase in response time from Obama’s website, but nothing serious.
It might be worth mentioning that while Hillary Clinton was still in the race, her website had problems on several occasions. We’re not saying that this affected the outcome of her struggle with Obama, but it certainly didn’t help.
Good uptime requires two things, a good web hosting company and a skilled webmaster to maintain the site. Both Obama and McCain’s staff have done a good job, although Obama’s perfect website uptime is hard to beat.
The monitoring referred to in this article was performed by the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.
