Top of the rankings this month is Virtual Internet, whose site responded to all but four of Netcraft's requests. Virtual Internet focuses on availability and reliability, with a high capacity data centre network throughout Europe. Its UK data centres provide high connectivity as well as redundant power and cooling, multiple fault-tolerant distribution paths and strict access controls.

In second place this month is New York Internet. The company has consistently performed well in Netcraft's most reliable hosters rankings, having been in the top five every month for the last six months. NYI has a strong commitment to network availability, maintaining upstream connectivity to multiple top tier providers, as well as its own peering points with small to medium ISPs.

Third place goes to INetU, which failed to respond to only six of Netcraft's requests in the last month. INetU has also been a regular fixture in the most reliable hosters recently, appearing in the top five eight times in the last year.

In terms of operating systems used by the most reliable hosters in October, the top ten are evenly split between Linux and FreeBSD.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty 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 customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on 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.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.