Multacom had the most reliable hosting company site in August 2013, with no failed requests and an average connection time of 0.105s. Multacom operates out of two secure data centres in Los Angeles, and focuses on providing shared and dedicated hosting services.

In second and third place were Hyve Managed Hosting and Bigstep. Both sites had only two failed requests, but Hyve’s slightly shorter time to connect gave it the edge over Bigstep. Hyve provides managed hosting options from data centres across America, as well as in Shangai, Hong Kong, and London. Hyve also handles hosting for several major international firms, including British Airways, Tesco and Nokia. Bigstep, which provides hosting services for “big data” companies, continues to maintain its impressive record since Netcraft started monitoring its performance, with a consistent 100% uptime over 5 months.

For the first time since May, hosting companies running Windows Server ranked in the top ten: Netcetera’s website runs on Windows Server 2012, INetU use Windows Server 2003 and Server Intellect use Windows Server 2008. The most reliable hosting company site, Multacom, runs FreeBSD (as does last month’s most reliable site, Swishmail). All other sites in the top ten run on Linux.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers’ sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer’s point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.