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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.

nginx was the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month, gaining 0.27 percentage points. Apache did experience a growth of 19M hostnames, but its market share has remained static, while Microsoft and Google had a small drop in market share despite gaining 3.9M and 450K hostnames respectively.

Within the Million Busiest Sites nginx continued its steady growth; gaining just over 12K new sites. Apache saw the biggest loss this month with a drop of 18K hostnames.

The Resin application server has been experiencing strong growth over the past 12 months; seeing an almost tenfold growth from 480k hostnames in February 2011 to 4.7M or 0.77% of the market in February 2012. Resin is a Java application server from Caucho which is used on a number of the Million Busiest Sites, including Bebo — now recovered from its outage last week.

For more information see Active Sites

Citrix bought NetScaler Inc. in 2005 for approximately $300M in cash and stock, acquiring an already maturing network appliance platform. NetScaler provides load balancing, an application firewall, and application acceleration to improve the performance and security of large web applications. NetScaler can run on a variety of dedicated hardware platforms, or it can be run as a server-based virtual appliance. BIG-IP is a competing product from F5 with similar features which reached 10 million sites back in May 2009.

1.71% of all websites found this month were served using the Citrix NetScaler platform; but within the top 100k busiest websites NetScaler's share is much higher at 9.24%. The country distribution of the installed base has a few peculiarities: almost 30% of the websites hosted in Turkey and 20% of the websites hosted in Korea are using NetScaler. In Turkey, the blogcu.com network is using Citrix NetScaler and in Korea more than 50% of the co.cc subdomains were found to be using the platform. Worldwide, Microsoft, eBay, Weather.com, CNET, and MasterCard are among the busiest sites using Citrix NetScaler.

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.

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:

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.

Ironically, NITDA is the clearing house for IT projects in Nigeria, and establishes a set of security guidelines for the Federal Government of Nigeria in its Computer Network Architecture Standards (COMNAS) Framework. This document covers the national policy on network security and describes vulnerability scanning and penetration testing procedures which may have prevented the fraudulent content from appearing on its own website.

Phishing sites are quite commonly hosted on government infrastructure: In July, Netcraft blocked 146 new phishing sites hosted in government domains around the world.

All major web server vendors have continued to gain hostnames this month with Apache, once again, achieving the largest increase of just under 16M hostnames. Despite this, Apache's market share fell by 0.3%, negating the increase experienced last month. Although Microsoft gained 1.8M sites it recorded a further drop in market share, extending a trend that dates back as far as June 2010. Conversely, nginx was the only major web server vendor to gain market share this month and set a new all-time high of 9.63%. Furthermore, it saw the second largest absolute growth with an addition of 6.9M hostnames.

In terms of Active Sites, nginx gained 1.9M which resulted in it overtaking Microsoft to have the second largest number of Active Sites (22.2M). Apache experienced the greatest rise this month with an addition of 3.7M Active Sites, more than double the increase it recorded last month.

Across the million busiest sites, Apache and Microsoft both lost market share this month whilst nginx and Google saw a small increase.

For more information see Active Sites

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The most reliable hosting company in December was Qube Managed Services, which responded to all but one of Netcraft's requests throughout the entire month. Qube offers managed hosting, cloud hosting and managed colocation for a range of customers, with a particular interest for those in the Finance and New Media sectors. The company was founded in London in 2001, where it now has two data centers. Customers can also make use of Qube's additional data centers in New York and Zurich.

Qube also performed well in the previous month, when it was the second most reliable hosting company.

Virtual Internet took second place, also with only one failed request, but with a longer connection time. The UK-based company provides a content distribution network (CDN) for the Monstermind game on Facebook, and also offers a range of private and public cloud hosting on both VMware and Xen hypervisors.

New York Internet was the third most reliable hosting company. NYI offers colocation, dedicated servers and virtual hosting from data centers in New York. The company focuses on reliability and technical support that is responsive round the clock.

Four of December's top ten most reliable hosting company sites used Linux, while three used FreeBSD, two used Windows Server 2008, and one used 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.