www.paypal.com was unavailable to most customers for more than an hour today, with no estimated time for resolution during the outage. PayPal uses scheduled maintenance windows every Thursday and Friday from 11pm to 1am PST, but this rarely results in any noticeable downtime, and today's outage extended beyond that window.

PayPal's payments API was also unavailable, which will have affected many online retailers, including PayPal's owner, eBay. A statement from eBay at 12:52am PST said: "EBay [sic] is currently experiencing checkout problems. Community members may see errors or timeouts when attempting to pay for an item. We are working on the problem and apologize for the inconvenience."

A live status update on the PayPal X Developer Network stated that there was no alternative work-around to the problem:

The problems with the PayPal website and payment APIs were resolved at 1:23am.

In the February 2011 survey we received responses from 284,842,077 sites.

Apache saw the largest increase in terms of both market share and absolute growth this month, with 9.6M new hostnames equating to a 1 percentage point increase in market share. This continues the general upward trend seen for Apache since January last year. The most significant increase occurred in the United States, where 7M new Apache hostnames were recorded. Once again, significant contributions to Apache's increase were seen at AmeriNOC (4.6M) and Softlayer Inc (1.3M). Apache also made a net gain of 817k hostnames in the Netherlands as the result of a 1.3M increase at Axoft Group.

nginx and lighttpd also made gains this month, although lighttpd's market share remained static as a result of the increases detected for the other major web server vendors.

Microsoft and Google both lost hostnames and market share this month. Microsoft's most significant loss came in Germany, with a 239k drop. This came as a result of 237k fewer hostnames being recorded at Kabel Deutschland.

Renesys earlier confirmed that Egyptian internet providers had returned to the internet just before 09:30 UTC; however, a few important sites mysteriously went back offline a short while later. www.mcit.gov.eg came online for a brief period, but then went offline again less than an hour later:

Before Egypt shut down internet access, the online collective Anonymous had been carrying out a distributed denial of service attack against this site; however, that attack did not appear to succeed at the time. Meanwhile, www.egypt.gov.eg has been online solidly since Egypt returned to the internet, whereas www.moiegypt.gov.eg has been coming and going:

This site was also attacked as part of an online protest by Anonymous, which resulted in some short outages on 26th January. A tweet from AnonymousIRC suggests that this site may be being kept offline by a second DDoS attack:

We are continuing to monitor the performance of several Egyptian sites at http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/wikileaks

The popular is.gd URL shortening service was reportedly unavailable for a few hours this morning, effectively breaking thousands of shortlinks posted to Twitter and other social networking sites. During the outage, the site's public-facing load balancer responded to PING requests, but was refusing HTTP connections to port 80.

is.gd is one of the most popular URL shortening services in current use – it has shortened 334 million URLs to date, which have been accessed more than 11 billion times. The service is wholly owned by UK hosting company Memset, which hosts the site on their own servers. Since December, Memset has also provided a shorter v.gd service, but this has only attracted 61 thousand URLs so far.

Memset told Netcraft that today's fault was caused by the failure of some virtual machines in the frontend cloud, which is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from the load balancer. These have been restored and the site is now back up and running with improved monitoring processes.

is.gd is primarily maintained by its creator, Richard West, a freelance developer and technologist. Memset proudly describe it as an "ethical" URL shortener; in particular, they have pledged to support is.gd as a free service indefinitely, will never place third-party adverts on the site and claim to be one of the most proactive URL shorteners in preventing spam and misuse.

Other sites hosted by Memset, including its own main presence at memset.com, were unaffected during the is.gd outage.

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.