-
Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in January 2012
Rank Company site OS Outage
hh:mm:ssFailed
Req%DNS Connect First
byteTotal 1 Swishmail FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.004 0.100 0.073 0.147 0.330 2 INetU Windows Server 2008 0:00:00 0.007 0.063 0.045 0.172 0.314 3 Multacom FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.007 0.186 0.093 0.188 0.398 4 Server Intellect Windows Server 2008 0:00:00 0.007 0.074 0.093 0.189 0.471 5 iWeb Technologies Linux 0:00:00 0.011 0.084 0.048 0.098 0.098 6 ServInt Linux 0:00:00 0.011 0.287 0.078 0.158 0.291 7 XILO Communications Ltd. Linux 0:00:00 0.015 0.151 0.036 0.194 0.275 8 New York Internet FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.015 0.115 0.072 0.145 0.392 9 Pair Networks FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.015 0.232 0.076 0.155 0.534 10 Virtual Internet Linux 0:00:00 0.022 0.122 0.058 0.121 0.159 Top of the table this month is Swishmail, which offers a variety of managed web hosting plans in addition to their core service of enterprise-grade email hosting.
INetU is at second place this month, which offers dedicated managed hosting services from data centres with resilient networks, backup power, and strong physical and network security. INetU also offers compliance and consultancy services to customers around the world and has recently received PCI DSS certification for their cloud service.
In third place is the California-based Multacom, which provides web hosting, dedicated servers, colocation, and managed services. Multacom's data centre is in downtown Los Angeles and offers fibre-optic links to many other carrier buildings both in Los Angeles and worldwide.
Within the top 10, Linux and FreeBSD were used by 4 hosting companies each, and Microsoft was used by 2. For the first time since July 2010, Linux was not used by any of the hosting companies in the top 4.
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.
-
February 2012 Web Server Survey
In the February 2012 survey we received responses from 612,843,429 sites. Compared to January, this represents an increase of 30M hostnames or +5.2%.
nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month, gaining 0.27 percentage points. Apache did experience a growth of 19M hostnames, but its market share has remained static, while Microsoft and Google had a small drop in market share despite gaining 3.9M and 450K hostnames respectively.
Within the Million Busiest Sites nginx continued its steady growth; gaining just over 12K new sites. Apache saw the biggest loss this month with a drop of 18K hostnames.
The Resin application server has been experiencing strong growth over the past 12 months; seeing an almost tenfold growth from 480k hostnames in February 2011 to 4.7M or 0.77% of the market in February 2012. Resin is a Java application server from Caucho which is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites, including Bebo — now recovered from its outage last week.
Total Sites Across All Domains
August 1995 - February 2012
Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains
August 1995 - February 2012
(more...)Developer January 2012 Percent February 2012 Percent Change Apache 378,267,399 64.91% 397,867,089 64.92% 0.01 Microsoft 84,288,985 14.46% 88,210,995 14.39% -0.07 nginx 56,087,776 9.63% 60,627,200 9.89% 0.27 Google 18,936,381 3.25% 19,394,196 3.16% -0.09 -
Citrix NetScaler Serves More Than Ten Million Sites
Netcraft has been tracking Citrix NetScaler in the Web Server Survey for more than a year. In the latest survey, more than ten million sites were found using Citrix NetScaler.
Citrix bought NetScaler Inc. in 2005 for approximately $300M in cash and stock, acquiring an already maturing network appliance platform. NetScaler provides load balancing, an application firewall, and application acceleration to improve the performance and security of large web applications. NetScaler can run on a variety of dedicated hardware platforms, or it can be run as a server-based virtual appliance. BIG-IP is a competing product from F5 with similar features which reached 10 million sites back in May 2009.
1.71% of all websites found this month were served using the Citrix NetScaler platform; but within the top 100k busiest websites NetScaler's share is much higher at 9.24%. The country distribution of the installed base has a few peculiarities: almost 30% of the websites hosted in Turkey and 20% of the websites hosted in Korea are using NetScaler. In Turkey, the blogcu.com network is using Citrix NetScaler and in Korea more than 50% of the co.cc subdomains were found to be using the platform. Worldwide, Microsoft, eBay, Weather.com, CNET, and MasterCard are among the busiest sites using Citrix NetScaler.
-
Bebo outage causes shutdown rumours
Social network Bebo is still inaccessible after an apparent technical error took the site offline yesterday.
Bebo was previously hosted on the Akamai content delivery network, which generally increases a site's resilience to network outages and traffic spikes, but DNS lookups for the www.bebo.com website are currently not resolving:
$ ping www.bebo.com ping: cannot resolve www.bebo.com: Host name lookup failure $ dig www.bebo.com ; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> www.bebo.com ;; global options: printcmd ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Twitter is currently awash with self-propagating rumours that Bebo has been shut down for good; however, this has been debunked by TechCrunch, which reports a Bebo spokesperson as saying the site went down due to "a technical clusterf**k". Michael Birch, who originally founded Bebo with his wife Xochi, also tweeted that the site should be coming back in a matter of hours.
-
Attacks resume against US Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice appears to be under attack for the second time since the popular Megaupload file sharing site was taken down. The group Anonymous appears to be carrying out this latest attack in protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)
In its Mega Song music video, which was released last month, Megaupload claimed the site had 1 billion users and accounted for 4% of all traffic on the internet. www.megaupload.com was the 77th busiest site according to the Netcraft Toolbar. The company's main website was hosted by Carpathia Hosting, but now displays an FBI anti-piracy warning hosted by Amazon. The warning explains, "This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court." Despite the static nature of the warning page, it appears to have struggled with the amount of traffic it was receiving over the weekend:
-
“Operation Italy” takes down government website

Plans by Anonymous to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.governo.it were changed half an hour before the attack was scheduled to commence. The group used IRC, Twitter, Pastebin and image sharing sites to advertise the attack a day before it was due to start, but the surprise change meant that www.italia.gov.it unexpectedly ended up bearing the brunt of the attack.

The DDoS attack against www.italia.gov.it was immediately successful, with the site becoming inaccessible from 14:00 UTC on Thursday. The attack appeared to subside a few hours later and the site is now functioning normally with no apparent changes to its infrastructure.
After seeing how easily its "lulzcannon" were able to take down www.italia.gov.it, some members of Anonymous called for the original target, www.governo.it, to be attacked as well. It was not apparent how many people took part in this secondary attack, but it appeared to have a minimal impact on the site's availability:
Advertisers Directory
- Rackspace Hosting
- Compare the Best Web Hosting Companies
- INetU Managed Hosting - Dedicated Servers
- Windows Dedicated Servers from Server Intellect
- Business Web Hosting Services - webhosting.uk.com
- Web Hosting - Dedicated Servers & VPS Hosting
- Managed Hosting - PCI Compliance by NeoSpire
- PEER 1 UK Hosting - Web Hosting & Managed Hosting
- PEER 1 Web Hosting - Managed Servers in the UK
- Bespoke European SEO Hosting - Over 150 C-Classes
- Best SEO Pay For Performance SEO
- Best Web Hosting and Dedicated Server by micfo
- SSL Certificates from 15 EURO per year