Top of the table this month is Swishmail, which offers a variety of managed web hosting plans in addition to their core service of enterprise-grade email hosting.

INetU is at second place this month, which offers dedicated managed hosting services from data centres with resilient networks, backup power, and strong physical and network security. INetU also offers compliance and consultancy services to customers around the world and has recently received PCI DSS certification for their cloud service.

In third place is the California-based Multacom, which provides web hosting, dedicated servers, colocation, and managed services. Multacom's data centre is in downtown Los Angeles and offers fibre-optic links to many other carrier buildings both in Los Angeles and worldwide.

Within the top 10, Linux and FreeBSD were used by 4 hosting companies each, and Microsoft was used by 2. For the first time since July 2010, Linux was not used by any of the hosting companies in the top 4.

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.

Social network Bebo is still inaccessible after an apparent technical error took the site offline yesterday.

Bebo was previously hosted on the Akamai content delivery network, which generally increases a site's resilience to network outages and traffic spikes, but DNS lookups for the www.bebo.com website are currently not resolving:

$ ping www.bebo.com
ping: cannot resolve www.bebo.com: Host name lookup failure

$ dig www.bebo.com
; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> www.bebo.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Twitter is currently awash with self-propagating rumours that Bebo has been shut down for good; however, this has been debunked by TechCrunch, which reports a Bebo spokesperson as saying the site went down due to "a technical clusterf**k". Michael Birch, who originally founded Bebo with his wife Xochi, also tweeted that the site should be coming back in a matter of hours.

The United States Department of Justice appears to be under attack for the second time since the popular Megaupload file sharing site was taken down. The group Anonymous appears to be carrying out this latest attack in protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

In its Mega Song music video, which was released last month, Megaupload claimed the site had 1 billion users and accounted for 4% of all traffic on the internet. www.megaupload.com was the 77th busiest site according to the Netcraft Toolbar. The company's main website was hosted by Carpathia Hosting, but now displays an FBI anti-piracy warning hosted by Amazon. The warning explains, "This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court." Despite the static nature of the warning page, it appears to have struggled with the amount of traffic it was receiving over the weekend:

Plans by Anonymous to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.governo.it were changed half an hour before the attack was scheduled to commence. The group used IRC, Twitter, Pastebin and image sharing sites to advertise the attack a day before it was due to start, but the surprise change meant that www.italia.gov.it unexpectedly ended up bearing the brunt of the attack.

The DDoS attack against www.italia.gov.it was immediately successful, with the site becoming inaccessible from 14:00 UTC on Thursday. The attack appeared to subside a few hours later and the site is now functioning normally with no apparent changes to its infrastructure.

After seeing how easily its "lulzcannon" were able to take down www.italia.gov.it, some members of Anonymous called for the original target, www.governo.it, to be attacked as well. It was not apparent how many people took part in this secondary attack, but it appeared to have a minimal impact on the site's availability:

Finnish anti-piracy organisation TTVK is still under attack after it successfully applied for one of the country's largest ISPs to block access to the popular bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay. The Helsinki District Court ordered Elisa Oyj to implement the block, and Elisa responded by appealing the decision to the Helsinki Court of Appeal.

In protest against the block, AnonFinland called for its supporters to "fire their cannons" at the TTVK's antipiracy.fi website, which quickly succumbed to the attack. Anonymous has issued similar calls to arms in the past – most notably towards the end of 2010, when WikiLeaks supporters successfully used the LOIC tool (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) to attack the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Shortly after calling for the site to be attacked, AnonFinland tweeted a now-customary "tango down" message, signifying that the attack had succeeded. With a Netcraft site rank of only 435586, it is likely that antipiracy.fi was typically not accustomed to large volumes of traffic. This, coupled with the fact that the site does not make use of a CDN to increase redundancy or reduce network latency, may have made the organisation an easy target.

antipiracy.fi – which is coincidentally hosted by Elisa Oyj – was still down at the time of publication.