New York Internet and ThePlanet are the most reliable hosting companies for December 2006, followed closely by Navisite, OLM, Rackspace and Hostway and GoDaddy.

The strong showing provides an immediate return on infrastructure upgrades by The Planet, which recently added multiple high-capacity 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections with its connectivity providers. The upgrade was part of The Planet's integration with EV1Servers, which were both acquired last May by private equity firm GI Partners.

New York Internet has now finished atop the survey eight times since 2003, and has regularly been among the top 10 performers. The colocation and managed hosting specialist is located in Manhattan's financial district. The top two finished just ahead of Navisite, a growing managed hosting provider with operations in the Boston area and India.

Five of the 10 most most reliable hosts run their web sites on Linux, while two use FreeBSD and three are powered by 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 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.