Customers of MediaTemple's GridServer, which received widespread attention upon its debut last month, experienced significant downtime Tuesday. GridServer is among the many cluster-based grid hosting services, offering the promise of enterprise-level reliability and scalability in an affordable web hosting plan.

GridServer got a big boost when its launch was featured on TechCrunch, a leading technology blog. On Tuesday, bloggers who were among the early adopters to GridServer were airing their grievances as their sites were slowed by performance problems. MediaTemple provided regular updates on its efforts to stabilize the system, citing bugs in a third-party storage system as the cause for the outages and sluggishness. The performance problems began at 10 a.m. Pacific time and continued past 5 p.m. for some customers.

Alexa, the search portal operated by Amazon.com, is experiencing significant performance problems today, with outages and delays seen from all of our monitoring points. In addition to basic search, Alexa provides data on the popularity of web sites visited by users of its toolbar (Note: Netcraft provides a similar service).

The performance issues for Alexa come as Amazon is pursuing an aggressive expansion into the utility hosting business, leasing its infrastructure to third-parties to provide scalable storage and hosting. Amazon's hosting initiative received considerable media coverage tied to CEO Jeff Bezos' presentation at last week's Web 2.0 conference.

A dynamically updating chart of the performance of Alexa.com is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

Netcraft's October phishing site competition saw many internet users continuing to battle it out to gain a top spot in our phishing site reporters list.

During October, alert members of the Netcraft Toolbar community discovered a clever attack against the popular social networking site MySpace. Other users of the Netcraft Toolbar were promptly protected against this convincing attack, which used MySpace's own servers to present a spoof login form.

To show our appreciation to the community, Netcraft will be sending a top of the range "Thanks for all the Phish" commemorative iPod to the five people who reported the largest number of phishing reports accepted during October.

The winners are: Les, Cori, Robb, DavidCh and Leo. Many thanks for your efforts! Each phishing site that is reported vastly reduces the number of victims falling prey to fraudulent activity on the Web. Netcraft has now received, reviewed and blocked 275,000 unique URLs reported to us as phishing sites.

The Netcraft Toolbar, which is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, serves as a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet: members who encounter a phishing fraud can act to defend the larger community of users against the attack. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for toolbar users who subsequently access the URL and widely disseminated attacks simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

In recent reviews Ziff-Davis comments "In testing on live phishing sites, IE 7 RC1 failed to identify as many phishing sites as Netcraft's free IE toolbar. " while the Washington Post remarked "I've visited countless phishing sites in the past few months, and Netcraft's toolbar has done its job almost unfailingly."

As U.S. voters go to the polls for a mid-term election likely to decide control of both houses of Congress, analysts say voter turnout will be a critical factor. Political web sites are key tools in this effort - provided they can stay online.

Hosting uptime became a contentious issue in Connecticut's primary election in August, as the campaign web site for veteran Sen. Joseph Lieberman was completely unavailable on election day. Lieberman, the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential candidate, was defeated by challenger Ned Lamont. Afterward, Lieberman's campaign manager blamed the Lamont camp for the outage, alleging "coordinated efforts to disable our Web site." Other analysts said the Lieberman campaign had likely exceeded the bandwidth allotment on its shared hosting account at MyHostCamp.com.

Lieberman is back, running as an independent, and has a new web host as well. The Joe2006.com site is now hosted by Web.com, and is performing well through midday:

A dynamically updating chart of the performance of Joe2006.com is available. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.

Microsoft has become an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, giving it the ability to sell domains directly to its customers. Microsoft has been reselling domain names from Melbourne IT, a registrar based in Australia that also provides wholesale domains to Yahoo and other hosting providers.

Microsoft's could use its new status to sell domain names for its Office Live small business hosting service, which is scheduled to come out of beta on Nov. 15 and provides a free domain name with each account. This would probably save Microsoft money on each domain sold, as wholesalers like Melbourne IT typically charge a small mark-up over the base fees from the central registry.

But not all companies that gain ICANN accreditation use it to sell their own domains. Google became a registrar last year but has yet to sell domain names to the public, preferring to use its status to focus on reducing spammy domains from its search results. Amazon.com also has ICANN accreditation, but has not pursued retail domain sales.

Rackspace and Tiscali are the most reliable hosting companies for October 2006, followed closely by Jumpline, WestHost, the UK's Demon Internet and Germany's Deutsche Telekom. Jumpline is based in Columbus, Ohio and focuses on the virtual dedicated server market, while WestHost is a Utah provider offering shared hosting.

Industry-leading reliability has become business as usual for Rackspace, a managed hosting specialist based in San Antonio, Texas, which finishes atop our monthly survey for the sixth time in 2006. Tiscali, an Italian company providing a broad range of hosting and domain services, was previously the most reliable host in May of this year and August 2005.

Five of the 10 most reliable hosters run their sites on Linux, while three use Solaris, two run on FreeBSD, and Windows hosts are shut out of the top 10 this month. The strong showing for Solaris includes two hosts (Demon, Deutsche Telekom) running Solaris 9/10 and one (Verio) on Solaris 8.

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. Domain industry juggernauts Go Daddy (U.S.) and 1&1 Internet (Germany) have also seen strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts, with the NCSA web server dominating with 57 percent market share, leading CERN (19%) and a newcomer named Apache (3.5%). Microsoft's Internet Information Server launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache and IIS. This month Apache leads with 60.3% market share, with Microsoft at 31.0% and Sun at 1.7%.

Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million). April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).

An explosion at online payment processor Paypal caused property damage, but resulted in no injuries. The company's web site, one of the Internet's busiest e-commerce sites, remained online throughout the incident.

The explosion Tuesday night at Paypal's network operations center in San Jose shattered a window and forced the evacuation of 26 employees, according to local media reports. Law enforcement officials said they "have suspicions" about what may have caused the blast, but did not detail them. The investigation team included members of the local police bomb squad.

A dynamically updating chart of the performance of Paypal.com is available here. Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.