DataPipe, Navisite, MyHosting.com and iWeb8 are the most reliable hosting companies for March 2007, followed closely by New York Internet and Webfusion. This marks the first time in the top spot of our monthly rankings for NaviSite and My Hosting.com, although each have been among the top 10 a number of times. DataPipe has been the most reliable host fives times previously, while iWeb8 was the top performer in January.

NaviSite is a managed hosting company in Andover, Mass., that also provides content distribution services. Navisite is publicly held, and was among the best performing U.S. stocks in the infrastructure sector in 2006, when its shares rose 457 percent. It has 950 customers in 14 data centers in the US, UK and India.

MyHosting.com is the hosting arm of SoftCom Technology Consulting, which also operates the mail2web email service. MyHosting.com is based in Toronto, Canada and was founded in 1997. The company specializes in hosting on the Microsoft platform, but added Linux hosting in 2004.

Three of the 10 most most reliable hosts run their web sites on Windows, fiveon Linux and two on 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 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.