For the second time in three months, six hosting companies share the top spot for the most reliable hosting company site, as Datapipe, New York Internet, AboveNet, Hostway, Rackspace and IPowerWeb finish in a dead heat for July. All six providers had just 0.01 percent of requests fail during the month, just a hair short of perfection.

Those strong performances came during a rough month for uptime, as late July power outages played havoc with some popular web destinations and hosting providers in data centers in California and the UK.

Five of this month's six leaders have previously finished atop the reliability survey at least once, but this marks the first appearance in the top spot for AboveNet, an IP services and connectivity provider with extensive operations in both the U.S. and the U.K.

Four of the 10 most reliable hosters run their sites on FreeBSD, while two use Linux, and Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Solaris 8 all make one appearance.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of fifty 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 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.