| Rank | Company site | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
| 1 | Datapipe | FreeBSD | 0.000 | 0.058 | 0.009 | 0.019 | 0.030 | |
| 2 | ServerStack | Linux | 0.000 | 0.026 | 0.051 | 0.103 | 0.103 | |
| 3 | iWeb | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.079 | 0.066 | 0.134 | 0.134 |
| 4 | GoDaddy.com Inc | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.092 | 0.069 | 0.303 | 0.617 |
| 5 | Server Intellect | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.016 | 0.085 | 0.172 | 0.430 |
| 6 | Swishmail | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.066 | 0.051 | 0.101 | 0.241 |
| 7 | Kattare Internet Services | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.008 | 0.148 | 0.126 | 0.252 | 0.520 |
| 8 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.100 | 0.036 | 0.072 | 0.073 |
| 9 | Pair Networks | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.013 | 0.186 | 0.059 | 0.121 | 0.461 |
| 10 | www.cwcs.co.uk | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.013 | 0.265 | 0.114 | 0.230 | 0.645 |
Datapipe was the most reliable hosting company in March 2013, with both the fastest average connection time and no failed requests. Even more impressive is its remarkable 100% uptime record, which now stretches back for more than 7 years, and its connection times are regularly among the fastest we see each month.
The second most reliable hosting company in March 2013 – also with no failed requests – was ServerStack. Since Netcraft started monitoring ServerStack in October 2012, their site has had an uptime record of 99.990%. The company’s 100% uptime SLA offers 5% credit for every half hour of sustained downtime, although this excludes periods of scheduled maintenance and its only outage so far lasted just 24 minutes.
iWeb ranked third after failing to respond to only one request during the whole of March. This performance was closely followed by Go Daddy and Server Intellect, each of which also failed to respond to just one request, but demonstrated marginally slower connection times than iWeb. Go Daddy’s appearance in fourth place came despite a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against its European webhosting operations, based in the Netherlands, which caused some of its customers’ websites to become temporarily unavailable.
The previous month’s winner, Hyve Managed Hosting, ranked eighth this time with three failed requests, but demonstrated very good average connection and total response times. These metrics are purportedly taken into account by Google’s search algorithms, resulting in better rankings. Hyve’s customers can gain similar advantages by using its high speed cloud platform with "light-speed" disk access, which allow its virtual servers to outperform traditional dedicated servers.
Datapipe runs its website on FreeBSD, which was also used by two other top-ten hosting companies during March: Swishmail and Pair Networks. Two sites were using Windows Server 2008, while the remaining five – including ServerStack – used Linux.
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.