Unaffected by the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Datapipe had the most reliable hosting company site in November. Webair, Logicworks, Serverstack, and INetU also had no outages in November despite their locations in the path of Sandy. In contrast to the problems with fuel supply at the beginning of the month, Logicworks CEO, Kenneth Ziegler, said "[Logicworks] were able to consistently deliver good news thanks to our partners receiving a predictable resupply of fuel for their generators": this story is repeated across many other successful hosting companies in the area.

Pair Networks’ site — located in Pittsburgh, at the periphery of the area affected by Sandy — came third in November. In common with Datapipe, Pair’s site is hosted on FreeBSD which is renowned for its reliability and is regularly seen in the top 10 table. ServInt was also on the edge of the area affected by the storm in Reston, Virginia and placed 5th in November, responding to all but six requests.

As one coast of the United States starts to pick up the pieces after a hurricane, another is battered by torrential rain and widespread flooding. The ‘Pineapple Express’ storm — so named because of its origins in the Pacific Ocean above Hawaii — has not been as damaging as Sandy: few hosting companies appear to have been affected by it at the time of writing this piece. Kattare, 6th in the table, is based in Corvallis, Oregon which is predicted to have minor flooding.

Server Intellect, hosted in Dallas away from the dramatic events on each coast, was placed 2nd, gaining 5 places from last month’s rank of 7. Server Intellect specializes in providing Windows-based hosting with data centers located in 3 cities spread across the United States: Washington D.C., Seattle, and Dallas.

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.