In the context of that the performance of the leading hosting company sites monitored by Netcraft seems quite respectable; only three hosting company sites amassed as much as a day’s downtime during the period, while at the other end of the spectrum, five providers went through the entire six month with no outages at all.

From customers’ point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on the 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. Seven hosting companies went through the period with less than 0.01% of requests failing from our five measurement points.

Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.

August, the mother of all months, which contained Blaster, Sobig and the North East US power outage, effectively decided several of places in the top 10. Five of the 2003 top 10- AboveNet, Datapipe, iPowerWeb, Yahoo, and Tierranet had no outages at all during August, whereas a thirteen hour power outage put paid to New York Internet, which otherwise sat in the top 10 most of the year.

Four owner managed hosting companies will take considerable pride that Yahoo, with its colossal financial resources and economies of scale, did not come top, with INetU edging out Datapipe, IPowerWeb, and Pair Networks by virtue of an extremely reliable Q4, and faultless December.

Netcraft measure and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from four separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

More information on the measurement process and current measurements are available.