The Vatican web site is offline, presumably due to a surge of web users seeking information about the conclave to elect the next Pope, which began today at the Sistine Chapel. The conclave, a secret ceremony in which 115 Cardinals select the next leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, was preceded by a special Mass at which a leading Vatican insider called on the electors to "defend traditional doctrine." News coverage of the remarks by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger may be a factor in the traffic slowing the Vatican site.

A dynamically updating chart of the availability of vatican.va is available here.

Rackspace, is once again ranked as the most reliable hosting company site this month, followed by OLM and INetU. Rackspace was also the top performer in February. This month's top 10 includes five sites running on Linux, two on Windows 2000, one on Windows Server 2003 and two on FreeBSD.

This marks the seventh 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 14 out of 16 months. Other consistent top 10 performers in recent months include Datapipe (eight of the last 10 months) and New York Internet (five of the last seven months).

The Vatican web site is struggling to handle a surge in web visitors seeking information on the deteriorating health of Pope John Paul II. Late last night Vatican officials announced that the 84-year-old Pontiff had suffered "septic shock and cardio-circulatory collapse" after receiving last rites earlier in the day.

Since its launch in 1995, the Vatican web site has become an important source of information about the Roman Catholic Church, and is available in six languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese). The Vatican has had a lengthy technology partnership with Hewlett-Packard, which provides infrastructure to help the Holy See scale its web operations, which run on a Compaq Tru64 operating system. But with more than 1 billion Catholics worldwide, the site is likely to struggle while the Pope's condition remains the focus of attention.

A dynamically updating chart of the availability of vatican.va is available here.

The Planet, one of America's largest web hosting providers, is experiencing outages and performance problems today. The fast-growing Dallas company hosts more than 502,000 active sites, up from 127,000 last March. The full extent of the outage is not clear, but a number of prominent sites hosted at The Planet were offline for 90 minutes or longer, and the corporate sites for ThePlanet.com and its major business units (dedicated server provider ServerMatrix.com and game hosting specialist Insomnia365) were unreachable for much of the morning. As services resume, customer sites appear to be getting priority. Among the customer sites that were offline and are now back in service are the Gawker network of weblogs:

A dynamically updating chart of The Planet.com's web site performance is available here.

The World of Warcraft virtual world, which now has more than 1.5 million users, has experienced extensive downtime in the past 24 hours following a system upgrade for a content patch. The main web site is now back online, and the game's operator, Blizzard Entertainment, currently lists all server "realms" as being online But WoW forum postings indicate that many users continued to experience problems through midday Wednesday.

A dynamically updating chart of World of Warcraft's web site performance is available here.