Familiar names occupy the top positions in this month's survey of the most reliable hosting company sites, as Datapipe, Rackspace and Interland share the top slot for October. This is the sixth time this year that Rackspace has won or shared the top slot, while Datapipe (four times) and Interland (twice) have also made multiple appearances atop the list. There's one new face in this month's top 10, HostingZoom, a Houston-based mixed hosting company that hosts its company site on a server at The Planet.

Five Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, along with two sites running on Windows 2000, two on Windows Server 2003 and one on FreeBSD. This continues the strong performance by hosters running their web sites on Linux. Of the 12 providers who have appeared atop the reliability survey for at least one month, six are hosted on Linux, while three use Windows 2000, two host on FreeBSD, and Windows Server 2003 and Solaris 8 are each used by one provider.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of fifty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from seven 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.