Interland, Rackspace and Hostway share the top slot as as the most reliable hosting companies site this month, followed by New York Internet and Hurricane Electric. Rackspace was also the top performer in February and in March, but this is the first time that Interland and Hostway have managed to reach this spot. The three co-leaders are leading players in the U.S. business hosting market, with each hosting more than 500,000 hostnames.

This month's top 10 includes four sites running on Linux, two on Windows 2000, one on Windows Server 2003 and three on FreeBSD.

This marks the eighth consecutive month in the top 10 for INetU, a managed hosting provider in Allentown, Pa. Since the start of 2004, INetU has been among the reliability leaders for 15 out of 17 months.

Thanks to everyone who has reported sites so far.

A new version of the toolbar is now available, with extensions including easy to see site risk ratings, faster browsing, and support for enterprise desktop rollouts.

Risk Ratings

In addition to blocking known phishing sites, the Netcraft Toolbar now displays a Risk Rating for all new sites it encounters. The Risk Rating - a user-friendly visual summary of the information displayed by the toolbar - evaluates new sites against characteristics of the phishing sites reported to date. Sites which are deemed safe will show a low Risk Rating, while riskier sites will show higher ratings based on a number of factors.

The above example shows a web site used to recruit people to withdraw money from compromised bank accounts. Although the site contains plausible content, the Netcraft Toolbar assigns a high Risk Rating because it is hosted under a newly registered domain, the site has never been seen in the Netcraft Web Server Survey, and the Chinanet Hebei Province network has hosted other fraud sites in the past.

The ratings will evolve and adjust automatically as phishers change their behavior, and along with pre-emptive blocking of cross site scripting, are particularly helpful to people who receive a phishing mail early on, before it has been reported by someone else in the community and blocked.

Protecting Enterprise Networks

The new version of the toolbar can now be run by ordinary Windows users without administrator or power user privileges. This new feature makes it simpler for administrators to deploy the toolbar across enterprise networks, offering real-time protection against phishing threats through automatic updates of the blocklist and Risk Ratings.

The list of sites blocked by the community and validated by Netcraft is also available as a feed suitable for proxy servers mail servers. Please contact us sales@netcraft.com for details.

Customized Branding and Navigation

Customized versions of the toolbar are available, providing banks, brokerages, credit card companies and ISPs a powerful tool to protect their customers and networks from Internet phishing scams while simultaneously building customer loyalty.

The toolbar can be branded with your logo and customized navigation links, served dynamically from the central server, giving clients the ability to update the toolbar to highlight new services, and other timely customer communication. Over and above the fraud fighting attributes of the toolbar, it is an extremely attractive branding and customer loyalty mechanism, as it keeps the clients' logo and services on screen throughout the time the customer spends using the Web.

The cost per user is very favorable when compared with traditional web advertising, while the branded toolbar maintains contact with the user throughout the time they spend using the Web. If you would like to have a version of the Netcraft Toolbar branded for your organization, please contact us sales@netcraft.com for details.

In the May 2005 survey we received responses from 63,532,742 sites, an increase of 1.24 million sites from last month. The gain continues the strong growth of the Web, which has added an average 1.2 million sites per month thus far in 2005.

Microsoft web servers had a modest 0.25% share improvement in active sites that reversed several months of small gains by Apache.

Striking workers at the Amen web hosting operation in France are using a weblog to air their grievances and try to gain a seat at the table as the business is sold to a new owner. Amen is part of cash-strapped VIA Networks, which last week agreed to a sale to UK provider Claranet to head off a liquidity crisis. But employees at Amen, which was bought by VIA last January, say they and their managers have been excluded from discussions about the sale and given no information about their fate, and gone on strike in protest.

The Amen on Strike blog, housed offsite at French host Nerim, details the Amen staffer's grievances over their treatment and ongoing efforts to meet with executives at VIA Networks to discuss their future. The amenengreve.info domain name was obtained through the proxy registration service at Network Solutions, which keeps the owner's name and address private.

It didn't take long for popesquatters to try and cash in on domains related to the new pope, Benedict XVI. The PopeBenedictXVI.com domain is for sale on eBay, with a starting price listed at $100,000, and a "buy it now" price of just $250,000. The domain owner is Total Interest Ltd., a Bahamas-based domain company that grabbed the name in February.

Other variations on the papal name taken by former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger are being auctioned at Sedo, where popesquatters Chris and Linda Dunaway of Gatlinsburg, Tenn. are offering an entire portfolio of Benedictine domains, including PopeBenedict.net, PopeBenedict.org, PopeBenedictXVI.net, Pope Benedict.info and PopeBenedictXVI.info.