DataPipe had the most reliable hosting company site in June 2009. The company's site responded without fail to every request made by Netcraft's performance collectors throughout the month.

This is DataPipe's second appearance at the top so far this year. Jersey City based DataPipe has established partnerships with Cisco, FreeBSD, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun, and VMware, and its commitments to customer service were recognised in this year's Stevie Awards, where the company was listed as a finalist in the Customer Service Department of the Year - IT & Telecommunications category. The company has more than 1,500 customers in six data centres and eight business office locations in the United States, the United Kingdom and China.

Among June's top ten hosting company sites, four companies (including DataPipe) run their sites on FreeBSD. Three other companies run their sites on Linux, while the remaining identifiable operating systems is Windows Server 2003.

Criminals often register their own domain name to perform phishing attacks. Unlike the other common phishing site scenarios (including hacked servers, open redirects, and abuse of free webhosting), phishing sites that have their own domain name can be harder to remove, because the website owner and domain owner is the fraudster. Only the hosting and DNS providers and the domain registrar are able to take the site down and also likely to cooperate.

The operation of top-level domains is generally split between a registry, which operates the infrastructure that answers DNS queries, and registrars, which sell domain names and provide the process for owners to maintain their records. Registries generally are not directly involved in removing phishing domains, and refer those to the registrar through which the domain was registered.

However, it is relatively easy to become a registrar, so large numbers of hosting companies, web design firms and domain name resellers are able to handle registrations. Registrars may not all respond quickly to abuse complaints. And in unusual cases registrars themselves may be involved in illegal activity.

There is a particular problem with so-called fast flux phishing attacks. Here the attacker uses a large pool of compromised hosts — often personal computers on DSL connections — and from these randomly chooses a number to act as web servers to host the phish (and also some to act as DNS servers for the phishing domain). The set of hosts used to support the phishing site is changed regularly, so efforts to contact the owner of one hacked system would at best cause the phishing site to be temporarily unavailable. ICANN (which hands out the contracts to operate generic top level domains including .com) published a report earlier this year looking at whether it should intervene to encourage adoption of more effective policies by registrars to prevent the abuse of fast-flux setups; but it seems reluctant to compel registrars to stop a practice that may also have some legitimate uses.

The one common point for any phishing attack is the URL sent to victims. In the case of fast-flux attacks, the owner of the domain will not cooperate and there are too many hacked systems hosting the phish for contacting the hosting provider to be effective. The only place where the attack can be quickly stopped is for the registrar or registry to suspend its domain name.

In the June 2009 survey we received responses from 238,027,855 sites, an increase of 2,137,329 on last month. A reduction in activity at Microsoft Live Spaces was responsible for the large drop in the number of Microsoft-IIS sites detected. Apache retains the dominant market share of 47.12%, approximately 112.2 million sites in total, and saw a modest increase in market share of 0.63 percentage points this month.

Meanwhile, Google has increased its market share by 1.3 percentage points to nearly 12 million sites, due mainly to increased activity on Blogger.

nginx continues to grow strongly, increasing its market share by 1 percentage point. It gains around 2.5 million sites this month, mostly due to more activity seen by the survey on blogging provider NetEase. nginx is also used by Wordpress.com, where Netcraft saw 180,000 more active blogs this month.

New York Internet, pair Networks and INetU had the most reliable hosting company sites in May 2009. Each of these sites responded resiliently to Netcraft's performance collectors throughout the month, with not a single failed request.

This is New York Internet's second consecutive appearance at the top. Established in 1996, the company's core services now include dedicated servers, colocation and virtual web hosting - all backed with a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

pair Networks also started off in 1996, with a $10,000 family loan funding a single employee and a partial T-1 line. The company has since grown to offer dedicated servers, virtual private servers and high volume hosting from its own datacentres in Pennsylvania, which use GigE connections to five diverse backbone networks.

INetU is an enterprise managed hosting company, also located in Pennsylvania. They stand by their network performance by offering a 100% uptime service level agreement. Managed services provided by INetU include MySQL and MS SQL database clusters, Exchange servers, virtualization and firewalls. Their clients include Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Northrop Grumman.

Among May's top ten hosting company sites, three companies (including New York Internet and pair Networks) run their sites on FreeBSD. Three other companies run their sites on Linux, while the remaining two identifiable operating systems are Windows Server 2003.

More than 10 million websites were found running F5 BIG-IP devices, in our most recent Web Server Survey. F5's BIG-IP product family uses the TMOS platform to provide a modular approach to traffic management, and several distinct modules are available for tasks such as load balancing, SSL acceleration and fast caching.

4.26% of all websites and around 3.8% of the top million sites are now served by F5 BIG-IP devices. Facebook, Bank of America and Adobe are among the sites with the largest amount of traffic using F5 BIG-IP.

F5 BIG-IP is particularly prominent in the United Kingdom, where it is used to serve 13.8% of all websites in the country; however, it is only found on 0.42% of the web-facing computers in the UK. This exemplifies a common BIG-IP deployment, where a large number of websites can be hosted by a relatively small number of frontend devices.