After www.georgewbush.com stepped away from the Akamai content management service on Nov 24, the site enjoyed a short-lived stay on a Windows 2000 server running Microsoft-IIS/5.0, hosted by the Republican National Committee. By Nov 30, the site had been moved to a FreeBSD server running Apache at BUSHCHENEY2004-65-172-163-128-255.

While response times have been improved since moving to FreeBSD, www.georgewbush.com is simply redirecting visitors to the Republican National Committee web site at www.gop.com; however, making an HTTP 1.0 request to www.georgewbush.com causes it to serve the “Test Page for Apache Installation” instead of instructing the browser to redirect to www.gop.com.

www.georgewbush.com continues to block access based on geographical location. A dynamically updating chart of site performance for www.georgewbush.com is available here

Another notable change was observed on Sun Microsystems’ web site at www.sun.com, which was upgraded from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9 on Nov 30. Sun’s tardy approach to running the latest version of Solaris on www.sun.com – Solaris 10 was recently released – is in sharp contrast to Microsoft, who ran www.microsoft.com on Windows 2003 for months ahead of its launch.