Datapipe most reliable hosting company site during second half of 2004

Of the leading hosting company sites monitored by Netcraft over the second half of 2004 only one hosting company site amassed over a day’s downtime during the period, while at the other end of the spectrum, seventeen providers went through the entire six months with no outages at all.

From a customers’ point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on the 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. Six hosting companies went through the period with 0.2% or less of requests failing from our seven measurement points.

Four companies in the top 10 were also in the corresponding top 10 a year ago, with Datapipe moving from second place last year to top the chart. Other companies in last years list include Pair Networks and iPowerWeb.

The distribution of operating systems commonly used by hosting companies amongst the sites is quite even with three of the top ten sites running on each of Windows, FreeBSD and Linux.

Netcraft measure and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from seven separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

More information on the measurement process and current measurements are available.