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.

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.

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.

Grid hosting providers may offer advantages over dedicated servers, but they're not immune to downtime. Mosso, a utility computing start-up launched earlier this year with backing from Rackspace, has experienced a significant outage today. The mosso.com web site was offline for more than an hour this morning after a series of shorter outages yesterday.

Mosso uses a "hosting system" of clusters of servers, an approach initially seen in enterprise hosting, which can offer advantages in redundancy and performance. The company is one of a growing number of hosting providers moving to grid hosting as an alternative to discount dedicated servers, which have been enormously popular with hosting resellers and power users. Improved reliability is among the key selling points for grid systems.

A dynamically updating chart of the performance of the Mosso.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.

Rackspace is the most reliable hosting company for September 2006, followed closely by managed hosting company Datapipe and Katarre, a colocation and dedicated hosting provider based in Corvallis, OR.

Rackspace, a managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas, has been a mainstay in our reliability rankings since we began tracking hosting company performance in 2003. This is the fifth time this year that Rackspace has been the most reliable hoster, compared to six times in 2005. The home page for the Rackspace.com web site did not have a measurable outage from March 2004 through November 2005, when it experienced three minutes of downtime.

Eight of the 10 most reliable hosters run their sites on Linux with the two remaining having Unknown OS.