Qube had the most reliable company site in September with only a single failed request. This is the fourth time this year that Qube has made it to first place, nudging ahead of Datapipe’s track record this year. Qube offers a Hybrid cloud service, where physical servers and equipment are integrated with its cloud hosting with a secure connection between the two networks.

The second most reliable hosting company site belonged to GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, and had only 3 failed requests in September. Memset and dinahosting also had only 3 failed requests and thus they were ranked by average connection times.

In third place is Memset. Memset was last ranked in the top 10 in June 2013 when it achieved 9th place with 6 failed requests. Memset offers its customers a Perimeter Patrol service, which involves regular scanning of Memset servers to highlight security vulnerabilities.

Linux was still the most popular operating system of choice, used by 6 of the top 10, followed by FreeBSD which was used by 3. EveryCity, however, uses SmartOS, a community fork of OpenSolaris geared towards cloud hosting using KVM virtualisation.

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.