Netcetera rounded off the year by having the most reliable hosting company site in December 2016, successfully responding to all but one of Netcraft's requests. In 2016, Netcetera made eight appearances in the top ten, reaching second place in February, March and June. Earlier in 2016, Netcetera celebrated 20 years of successful business, thanking its clients, including some that have been with the company since the day it opened.

Netcetera is based on the Isle of Man, a self-governing territory of the United Kingdom known for its low-tax economy. Netcetera's data centre, The Dataport, uses several energy-saving technologies including Free Air Cooling and virtualisation, which when coupled with carbon offsetting, make it a zero carbon data centre. This carbon-neutral approach is estimated to have saved more than two million kilograms of CO₂ to date.

Qube Managed Services took second place in December, with five failed requests. Qube also fared well over the course of 2016, with December marking its tenth appearance in the top ten, including two times at the top of the table, in March and October. Qube uses data centres in London, New York and Zurich to provide its cloud, colocation and managed services; and like Netcetera's website, Qube's is served from a Linux machine.

XILO Communications Ltd came third, also with five failed requests, but with a slower average connection time than Qube. XILO uses enterprise-class Dell hardware for its shared, reseller and cloud hosting services, and also made ten appearances in the top ten during 2016, which included a first place in July. Like Qube, XILO is headquartered in the UK and uses Linux to host its own website.

Seven of December's top ten most reliable hosting company sites were served from Linux machines, including Anexia's, which also had only five failed requests. The remainder used Windows Server 2012, FreeBSD and SmartOS. Linux was the most common operating system used amongst the top ten hosting provider sites over the course of 2016, with two months having a top ten that consisting entirely of Linux-powered websites.

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.