Hostway, Datapipe, France Telecom and Express Technologies share the top slot as as the most reliable hosting company sites this month.

Express Technologies (Hosting.com), a provider based in Louisville, Kentucky, makes its first appearance of 2005 among the most reliable hosters after four showings in the top 10 in 2004. This month also marks Express Tech's first time as the leading performer. Datapipe shared the top spot last month (along with Rackspace and Tiscali), while Hostway was the most reliable hoster in our April survey.

Five Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, along with three sites running on Windows 2000, and one apiece on Windows Server 2003 and FreeBSD.

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

From a 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.

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