Top of the table this month is Swishmail, which offers a variety of managed web hosting plans in addition to their core service of enterprise-grade email hosting.

INetU is at second place this month, which offers dedicated managed hosting services from data centres with resilient networks, backup power, and strong physical and network security. INetU also offers compliance and consultancy services to customers around the world and has recently received PCI DSS certification for their cloud service.

In third place is the California-based Multacom, which provides web hosting, dedicated servers, colocation, and managed services. Multacom's data centre is in downtown Los Angeles and offers fibre-optic links to many other carrier buildings both in Los Angeles and worldwide.

Within the top 10, Linux and FreeBSD were used by 4 hosting companies each, and Microsoft was used by 2. For the first time since July 2010, Linux was not used by any of the hosting companies in the top 4.

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. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.