Six hosting companies share the top spot this month, with INetU, Hostway, IPower, New York Internet, Pair Networks and Tiscali all sharing the top spot as the most reliable hosting company site this month.

The six-way tie is a first for the reliability survey, as three and even four providers have shared the top position in the past. The showing reflects a strong month for hosting reliability, as the winners each had just 0.01 percent of their DNS responses fail, just a hair short of a perfect showing. All six companies have finished atop the survey at least once previously.

It was a particularly good month for providers hosting their home page on FreeBSD, four of whom (INetU, iPowerWeb, NY Internet and Pair Networks) shared the top spot with two hosts on Linux (Hostway and Tiscali). Overall, five Linux sites are found in the top 10 this month, four on FreeBSD and one on Windows.

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