Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in March 2018

Rank	Performance Graph	OS	Outage hh:mm:ss	Failed Req%	DNS	Connect	First byte	Total
1	Rackspace	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.690	0.022	0.051	0.051
2	XILO Communications Ltd.	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.318	0.071	0.142	0.143
3	Webair	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.355	0.081	0.161	0.161
4	Hyve Managed Hosting	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.194	0.082	0.664	0.665
5	CWCS	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.332	0.116	0.220	0.220
6	New York Internet	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.004	0.579	0.060	0.125	0.125
7	EveryCity	SmartOS	0:00:00	0.004	0.240	0.071	0.317	0.317
8	vXtream Ltd	Linux	0:00:00	0.004	0.243	0.076	0.153	0.153
9	Memset	Linux	0:00:00	0.004	0.246	0.083	0.165	0.165
10	Swishmail	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.004	0.253	0.085	0.171	0.173

See full table

Rackspace had the most reliable hosting company website in March 2018, with no failed requests and an average connection time of 22ms—the quickest amongst the top ten. Rackspace provides a diverse range of managed cloud hosting solutions to customers around the globe, with data centres and offices in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Four other hosting company sites also successfully responded to all requests this month, with the tie broken by average connection time. XILO Communications takes second place with a 71ms average connection time. XILO Communications has maintained 99.99% uptime over 5 years, and has appeared in the top ten in each of the first three months of 2018.

Third and fourth place positions were extremely close, with a difference of just 1ms in the sites' average connection times separating them. Webair came in third place, with an 81ms average connection time. Webair provides managed cloud services from its data centres in New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Amsterdam.

Hyve Managed Hosting's site takes fourth place with an average connection time of 82ms. Hyve continues its top ten streak, now having had its site in the top ten for 14 consecutive months. Hyve operates its services from 18 different data centres worldwide and has maintained 100% uptime since Netcraft began monitoring it in June 2016. CWCS takes fifth place with a connection time of 116ms, also with no failed requests.

Linux is the most popular operating system among the top ten this month, accounting for seven of the top ten sites. FreeBSD makes a couple of appearances, with SmartOS making a single appearance.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around thirty 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.

Posted by Netcraft on 4th April, 2018 in Hosting, Performance

March 2018 Web Server Survey

In the March 2018 survey we received responses from 1,770,411,187 sites across 214,774,438 unique domain names and 7,333,606 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 43,000 computers, and 738,000 additional domains. The total number of hostnames fell by 68.2 million, and the number of active sites fell by 3.4 million.

Domain growth this month was shared between nginx and Microsoft; nginx increased its market share by 0.15 percentage points by gaining 482,000 domains while Microsoft gained slightly fewer with 413,000. Market leader Apache lost 568,000 domains and continues to lose market share, its share now stands at 37.6%.

Apache also loses out when looking at the number of web-facing computers, 31,000 fewer computers were seen running the web server software in March leading to a drop in market share of 0.67 percentage points. Microsoft also lost computers, seeing 100 fewer, while nginx continues to gain both computers and market share. Nearly 1.8 million web-facing computers were seen running nginx in March, giving it 24.5% of the market.

New Releases

The Apache Software Foundation announced the release of Apache 2.4.33 on 23 March; this is the first release announced since Apache 2.4.29 in October 2017, the skipped version numbers were not publicly announced due to issues which came to light during the release process. The 2.4.x branch is recommended over all previous releases.

OpenLiteSpeed, the open source software behind the commercial LiteSpeed HTTP server, received releases to both its stable and latest branches in February, version 1.4.30 was released on 14 February and version 1.5.0 RC2 on 15 February, both releases fix the same set of issues.

lighttpd version 1.4.49 released on 11 March, with it the open source web server adds basic support for the HTTP CONNECT method along with several bug fixes. lighttpd is seen in use serving sites on 500,000 unique domains in the March survey; these are served from 21,000 web-facing computers.

Developer	February 2018	Percent	March 2018	Percent	Change
Microsoft	634,359,419	34.50%	633,719,941	35.80%	1.29
Apache	504,701,560	27.45%	464,340,535	26.23%	-1.22
nginx	447,224,456	24.32%	409,124,174	23.11%	-1.22
Google	22,022,633	1.20%	21,802,670	1.23%	0.03

Continue reading →

Posted by Netcraft on 27th March, 2018 in Web Server Survey

Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in February 2018

Rank	Performance Graph	OS	Outage hh:mm:ss	Failed Req%	DNS	Connect	First byte	Total
1	EveryCity	SmartOS	0:00:00	0.000	0.244	0.069	0.316	0.317
2	XILO Communications Ltd.	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.315	0.070	0.139	0.140
3	ServerStack	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.260	0.086	0.173	0.173
4	New York Internet	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.005	0.575	0.045	0.092	0.092
5	vXtream Ltd	Linux	0:00:00	0.005	0.246	0.076	0.154	0.154
6	Hyve Managed Hosting	Linux	0:00:00	0.005	0.188	0.085	0.538	0.538
7	Swishmail	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.005	0.255	0.085	0.170	0.171
8	Pair Networks	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.005	0.380	0.095	0.189	0.189
9	Memset	Linux	0:00:00	0.009	0.252	0.083	0.166	0.166
10	www.dinahosting.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.009	0.302	0.093	0.186	0.186

See full table

The most reliable hosting company website this month belongs to EveryCity, with no failed requests and a speedy average connection time of just 69ms. EveryCity, which has maintained 100% uptime over the past two years, offers its own cloud hosting solutions, as well as managed third-party cloud hosting services, including AWS and Azure.

Two other hosting company sites also successfully responded to each of Netcraft's requests this month, and were therefore ranked according to their average connection times. Second place was earned by XILO Communications, which was, on average, only a millisecond slower than first-place EveryCity. XILO Communications has maintained a 99.99% uptime over 5 years. Third place goes to ServerStack with an average connection time of 86ms and 99.98% uptime over 5 years.

Hyve Managed Hosting continues its top-ten streak, making February 2018 the 13th consecutive month its website has appeared in the top ten most reliable hosting company sites table. Hyve has maintained a consistent 100% uptime since Netcraft began monitoring its site in July 2016.

Linux is the most popular operating system this month, being used by six of the top ten most reliable hosting company sites. FreeBSD makes three appearances. SmartOS — a specifically cloud-oriented platform based on OpenSolaris and Linux KVM virtualisation — is the OS of choice for EveryCity, which had the most reliable website this month.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

Posted by Netcraft on 6th March, 2018 in Hosting, Performance

nginx, Nginx, NGiИX, or NGINX?!

While nginx capitalizes on the demand for its high performance, recently overtaking Microsoft with its install base, its own name has also had a tendency to be capitalized. Originally called nginx, the server is today used by several commercial products that have rebranded it as NGINX. This has led to much confusion over how the name of this server should be stylised.

nginx is consistently written in lowercase on the nginx.org website – even when it is used to start a sentence, like in this paragraph. The original author of nginx, Igor Sysoev, also writes the server's name in lowercase on his own website; but most notably, the name also appears in lowercase in the HTTP Server headers of the 447 million sites that run nginx today:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.13.7
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 11:45:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 287521
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Language: utf-8
Last-Modified: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 11:45:38 GMT

Conversely, NGINX Inc. – which provides commercial support for nginx – stylizes the name of the open source server as NGINX. To add an earlier alternative into the mix, the company previously clarified that its own name was Nginx and that the server was NGINX; but it has since adopted the NGINX stylization for the name of its company, too.

To add further confusion, both nginx.org and NGINX Inc. use the same NGiИX logo, which uses a mixture of uppercase and lowercase Cyrillic letters:

"NGiИX" logo

The fully-capitalized NGINX name could become a more prominent term as time goes by, especially with the new NGINX Unit product being announced on nginx.org. Similarly-branded products supported by NGINX Inc. are NGINX Plus (a software load balancer, web server and content cache built on top of the open source nginx server), the NGINX Controller monitoring and management platform, the NGINX Amplify SaaS-based monitoring tool, and the NGINX WAF (web application firewall).

nginx has also been referred to as nginx, Nginx and NGINX by Cloudflare, which uses a modified version to optimize the delivery of its customers' websites; but notably, the most recent articles on the Cloudflare blog have trended towards using the fully-capitalised name. Cloudflare also ditched the lowercase nginx from its server name recently, renaming it from cloudflare-nginx to just cloudflare, although this change was merely intended to reflect the lesser role that nginx now plays in Cloudflare's software stack.

Also bear in mind that the fully-capitalised NGINX Inc. was co-founded in 2011 by nginx's original author, who currently serves as its CTO. This could be viewed as tacit approval of the uppercase variant, but the lowercase nginx name remains far more visible today: Wix, WordPress, Groupon, Zendesk, Adobe, OpenDNS and Buzzfeed are among those listed as NGINX customers, but all of their NGINX-powered sites exhibit the lowercase nginx in Server headers.

However you write it, nginx's strong growth has turned it into the second most commonly used server on web-facing computers.

However you write it, nginx's strong growth has turned it into what is now the second most commonly used server on web-facing computers.

NGINX Inc. further dilutes its branding by calling its annual NGINX user conference nginx.conf, mimicking the name of nginx's main configuration file. These lowercase legacies of nginx are likely to manifest themselves for some time yet.

With no canonical naming conventions apparent, Netcraft will continue to use the lowercase nginx to refer to the open source nginx server, as well as the group of products closely based on it (including NGINX Plus and, until recently, cloudflare-nginx). The uppercase NGINX will be used to describe products and services that are exclusively provided by NGINX Inc.

Posted by Paul Mutton on 20th February, 2018 in Around the Net

February 2018 Web Server Survey

In the February 2018 survey we received responses from 1,838,596,056 sites across 214,036,874 unique domain names and 7,290,968 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 63,000 computers, and nearly a million additional domains. Overall hostname growth was 33 million, and the number of active sites grew by 9.3 million.

Microsoft dominated this month's domain growth, with an extra 1.1 million domains (+2.0%) taking its market share up by 0.41 percentage points to 26.5%, while Apache lost 115,000 domains. Microsoft also saw the largest hostname growth, with an additional 59 million sites taking its leading hostname share up by 2.65 points to 34.5%.

After excelling in all growth metrics last month, nginx did not sweep the board this time. Although its computer growth continued to be strong – gaining 44,000 this month – it lost 11.2 million hostnames globally. The primary cause of this was more than 15 million sites switching from nginx to Apache. Most of these sites were previously hosted by Raksmart in China, but are now hosted by Data Foundry in the United States.

All four of the largest major vendors – Apache, nginx, Google and Microsoft – gained active sites this month. Apache made the largest gain of 2.1 million, but this was not enough to prevent its active sites share falling by 1.1 points to 42.7%. Nonetheless, Apache continues to lead with more than twice as many active sites as its closest competitor, nginx.

Cloudflare-nginx migration underway

For several years, every edge machine in Cloudflare's content delivery network (CDN) exhibited the Server: cloudflare-nginx HTTP response header. This reflected the fact that its custom software stack was based on nginx – but this month's survey saw a vast swathe of websites switching to a new Server: cloudflare header.

Although nginx remains part of Cloudflare's stack, it plays less of a role than it once did. The code that handles HTTP requests on Cloudflare's machines now goes far beyond the capabilities of nginx alone, and Cloudflare also hints that it will most likely end up writing its own caching software instead of using nginx.

In line with Cloudflare's reasoning, Netcraft's survey treats the new cloudflare server as a distinct product to nginx, and this has taken a chunk out of nginx's share in the top million sites. The new cloudflare server already accounts for 5.2% of the top million sites, and this share will undoubtedly increase next month.

The transition to the new cloudflare server banner started on 18 December 2017, and the February 2018 survey found nearly 60% of Cloudflare's sites using the new banner. It is likely that they will all use the new banner by next month's survey.

Other web server news

The developers of nginx have added support for HTTP/2 Server Push, which is likely to be made available in the next release. This feature allows web servers to send resources such as images and stylesheets before they are requested by the browser, which can make some webpages load faster.

After coming to prominence last month, DPS is now the 9th largest server by domains. It continues to be used almost exclusively by GoDaddy to host sites created with its Website Builder tool, and it is still being regularly updated. The current version in use at the time of writing is DPS 1.2.1, whereas a month ago it was 1.1.20.

OpenLiteSpeed 1.5.0 RC1 was released on 2 February, adding new Multi-Thread APIs and a module developer guide. This followed the 10 January release of 1.4.29, which is currently the latest stable version of the freely available open source server. Just over 2.5 million domains are currently using OpenLiteSpeed or the commercially available LiteSpeed Web Server product. Both products use the same LiteSpeed server banner and do not reveal version numbers.

Finally, NGINX Unit saw a few new releases since the last survey. NGINX Unit 0.4 was released on 15 January. This was the first release of the lightweight web application server to be compatible with DragonFly BSD, but it was mostly a bugfix release that eliminated some significant regressions in the previous version. NGINX Unit 0.5 was then released on 8 February, adding a Perl application module that allows it to run applications like Bugzilla; however, this release was not announced, as it contained a serious regression that could cause the main process to die. This was rectified in NGINX Unit 0.6, which was announced on 9 February.

Developer	January 2018	Percent	February 2018	Percent	Change
Microsoft	575,026,648	31.85%	634,359,419	34.50%	2.65
Apache	491,259,918	27.21%	504,701,560	27.45%	0.24
nginx	458,386,423	25.39%	447,224,456	24.32%	-1.07
Google	21,657,796	1.20%	22,022,633	1.20%	-0.00

Continue reading →

Posted by Netcraft on 13th February, 2018 in Web Server Survey

Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in January 2018

Rank	Performance Graph	OS	Outage hh:mm:ss	Failed Req%	DNS	Connect	First byte	Total
1	ServerStack	Linux	0:00:00	0.000	0.126	0.060	0.118	0.118
2	vXtream Ltd	Linux	0:00:00	0.006	0.135	0.053	0.107	0.107
3	XILO Communications Ltd.	Linux	0:00:00	0.006	0.184	0.059	0.118	0.118
4	Memset	Linux	0:00:00	0.006	0.146	0.067	0.133	0.133
5	Pair Networks	FreeBSD	0:00:00	0.006	0.249	0.067	0.135	0.135
6	CWCS	Linux	0:00:00	0.006	0.203	0.123	0.201	0.201
7	Bigstep	Linux	0:00:00	0.011	0.155	0.059	0.121	0.121
8	www.arvixe.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.011	0.145	0.081	0.167	0.167
9	ReliableServers.com	Linux	0:00:00	0.017	0.312	0.009	0.160	0.160
10	Hyve Managed Hosting	Linux	0:00:00	0.017	0.092	0.056	0.116	0.116

See full table

ServerStack had the most reliable hosting company website in January 2018, with the only site to respond successfully to each of Netcraft's requests. Its website appeared in the top 10 five times in 2017, and a total of 46 times since its inclusion in 2012. The hosting company, which operates three data centres in the US and Europe, provides managed hosting and was co-founded by brothers Moisey and Ben Uretsky, who later went on to start cloud provider DigitalOcean.

The next five hosting company sites each had only a single failed request, with the tie being broken by average connect time. Of these five, vXtream's Qube site had the quickest average connect time (53ms), earning it second place. vXtream, which recently acquired Qube, offers managed hosting, colocation, and cloud-based solutions from data centres in Zurich, London and New York. Its website, qubenet.net, has appeared in the top 10 a total of ten times in 2017. The sites belonging to XILO, Memset, pair Networks, and CWCS were ranked 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th according to their average connect times.

Hyve Managed Hosting's site continues its top 10 streak, now having been amongst the top 10 most reliable hosting company sites for 12 consecutive months. It claims 10th place this month, with three failed requests but a fast response time. Hyve's website has sustained a 100% uptime record since Netcraft began monitoring it in 2016.

Linux is the most popular operating system this month, being used by nine of the top ten hosting companies. FreeBSD also makes an appearance as Pair Networks's OS of choice.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

Posted by Netcraft on 6th February, 2018 in Hosting, Performance

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