| Rank | Company site | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
| 1 | Datapipe | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.004 | 0.088 | 0.019 | 0.044 | 0.066 |
| 2 | Swishmail | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.004 | 0.123 | 0.041 | 0.084 | 0.221 |
| 3 | ServInt | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.004 | 0.156 | 0.047 | 0.097 | 0.208 |
| 4 | aruba.it | Windows Server 2003 | 0:00:00 | 0.004 | 0.179 | 0.127 | 0.250 | 0.250 |
| 5 | Qube Managed Services | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.077 | 0.041 | 0.083 | 0.083 |
| 6 | INetU | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.095 | 0.041 | 0.167 | 0.432 |
| 7 | New York Internet | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.107 | 0.043 | 0.087 | 0.306 |
| 8 | www.micfo.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.147 | 0.063 | 0.312 | 0.460 |
| 9 | www.peer1.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.012 | 0.109 | 0.019 | 0.042 | 0.142 |
| 10 | www.catalyst2.com | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.012 | 0.286 | 0.086 | 0.178 | 0.359 |
Datapipe was the most reliable hosting company in September, giving it an impressive six victories so far this year. Note that the top four hosting companies had the same number of failed requests, so they have been sorted by average connection time.
During September, Datapipe augmented its range of hosting services by announcing the public availability of the first PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 Service Provider certified cloud computing platform, and also partnered with Alert Logic to release a fully managed advanced network security solution for Amazon Web Services. Next month, Datapipe will be sending a four person team from their Hong Kong team to run 100km in the Oxfam Trailwalker.
In second place was Swishmail. Primarily an email provider, the company also offers several managed web hosting plans. Both Datapipe and Swishmail run their company websites on FreeBSD, which was used by half of the top ten hosting companies in the previous month.
Not far behind in third place, ServInt offers managed dedicated servers and scalable virtual private servers. Founded in Northern Virginia in 1995, over 25% of its employees have served for more than 10 years.
Fourth-place Aruba is an Italian hosting company, whose parent group operates several offices and data centres across Europe. Aruba offers Windows and Linux hosting solutions, some of which have ‘unlimited‘ disk space and traffic.
Four of September’s top ten hosting company websites used Linux, while three used FreeBSD, two used Windows Server 2008 and one used Windows Server 2003.
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.