This month's most reliable hosting company is Datapipe. Datapipe was ranked first last month, and has now been in the top ten for 11 of the last 12 months. Datapipe offers managed hosting and IT services from six data centers distributed across the globe and has recently started to offer managed cloud hosting through a product called the Datapipe Managed Cloud. This new service is backed by Amazon Web Services, and Datapipe say it's the "first Managed Services Provider of significant scale and size to offer Amazon Web Services to enterprise clients in a comprehensive, all-inclusive managed services program."

In second and third place this month are Swishmail, which offers managed email and web hosting, and New York Internet which offers various services, including dedicated servers, colocation and web hosting. Swishmail and New York Internet also frequently appear in Netcraft's top ten most reliable hosting company sites.

This month, the three most reliable hosting company sites are being served by FreeBSD. Of the remaining seven sites, six run Linux and one runs Windows Server 2003.

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.

Four of the hosting companies sampled this month experienced no failed requests at all to their websites, and these four are therefore ranked by average connection time. Top of the table is Datapipe, which has been in the top ten in ten of the last twelve months, and in the top three seven times in the same period. The company offers a variety of services including colocation, cloud computing and hosted servers from datacentres in the U.S., the U.K. and China.

Second this month is iWeb Technologies, which has also appeared in the top ten regularly over the last year. iWeb have been offering hosting services for over ten years with a range of products which includes shared web hosting, managed hosting and dedicated servers.

www.codero.com ranked third this month. The company is a relative newcomer to the hosting industry, having begun life as a division of aplus.net in July 2009. It now offers dedicated and managed hosting services aimed specifically at small businesses.

In terms of operating system, the top ten hosting companies are evenly split between Linux and FreeBSD this month with four of each and one company running F5 Big-IP.

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.

The most reliable host this month was Swishmail which responded to all but three of Netcraft's requests. Swishmail ranked ninth last month and has been present in the top ten since October. They primarily offer business level email and web hosting solutions.

In second place this month was ServInt which responded to all but four of our requests. The company specialises in offering managed hosting and has climbed from tenth position after entering the top ten last month. This good performance could perhaps have been a factor in the decision to host WikiLeaks.org with ServInt a fortnight ago.

Ranking third this month was Logicworks which also failed to respond to four requests. The host was last present in the top ten in October when it came in at number seven. Logicworks provide a variety of cloud and managed hosting solutions.

Seven of December's top ten hosting company sites run Linux, two run FreeBSD and one runs F5 BIG-IP.

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.

Despite its economic woes, Ireland is the country with the largest growth* this year in number of public-facing web servers in Netcraft's hosting provider server count. However, this is mostly due to large growth at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

Amazon started offering its EC2 service in the EU in December 2008, via a datacenter in Dublin. Since then it has been the fastest-growing hosting company in Ireland. Amazon's cloud hosting now makes up more than a third of all internet-facing web servers in Ireland, with three times more web servers hosted than the next largest hosting location.

INetU was this month's most reliable hoster, failing to respond to only three of Netcraft's requests. The hoster has a consistently good record, last month ranking third and regularly appearing in the top ten. INetU offers managed hosting services and prides itself on its high level of customer service.

Second place this month is Rackspace, which offers managed, cloud and application hosting from its nine datacentres in the U.S., the U.K. and Hong Kong. Rackspace offers "Fanatical Support" allowing customers to contact the company 24 hours a day.

Codero ranked third this month, with only five failed requests in October. Codero appeared in the top ten hosters in September and October but this is the first time it has been in the top three. The company offers dedicated and managed hosting aimed specifically at the needs of small businesses.

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.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.