Most Reliable Hosting Providers during April
4th May, 2004
April 1st - 30th 2004
During April, Jumpline, a hosting company which specialises in Virtual Private Server [VPS] solutions, was the most reliable of the hosting company sites we monitor. Second placed was Energis, the UK telco and high end hosting provider, and third was Komplex, the German hosting company which was top during March.
Notably, this month five of the top ten sites were running Linux. This is first time since the performance analysis of hosting company sites started that Linux has been the leading operating system for site reliability. Until now FreeBSD had without exception been the most common operating system amongst the top ten each month. However, this month, the top ten comprises five sites running Linux, three running FreeBSD and one each running OpenBSD and Windows, with Energis running Windows and Secure Dog running OpenBSD.
Most Reliable Hosting Providers during March
4th April, 2004
March 1st - 31st 2004
During March, Komplex, a leading German hosting company site went through the month without any failed requests. Apart from Komplex, which runs Linux, the Top 10 places were almost evenly split between FreeBSD and Windows, with five of the top 10 hosting company sites running FreeBSD, and four on Windows.
Most Reliable Hosting Providers during February
1st March, 2004
February 1st - 29th 2004
During February both the Pair Networks and Seeweb sites were faultless with no failed requests at all from any of our five measurement points.
INetU, Secure Dog most reliable hosting company sites during January
4th February, 2004
January 1st - 31st 2004
During January both the INetU and Secure Dog sites were faultless with no failed requests at all from any of our five measurement points.
This is the second month running that INetU's site has had no failed requests at all, and it has now been in the top three for the last four months. As neither INetU or Secure Dog had any failed requests, INetU is ranked above Secure Dog because the average connection time from our performance measurment points to the INetU site was faster.
Third was www.pair.com, a consistently reliable site which was placed fourth for H2 2003. All of the top three sites run on BSD operating systems.
Two European hosting company sites made it in to the top 10. Cable & Wireless and Energis, respectively the second and third largest telcos' in the UK were fifth and tenth. Energis is Netcraft's own connectivity provider, but has no special advantage as none of the measurement points are on the Energis network.
INetU most reliable hosting company site during H2 2003
11th January, 2004
In the context of that the performance of the leading hosting company sites monitored by Netcraft seems quite respectable; only three hosting company sites amassed as much as a day’s downtime during the period, while at the other end of the spectrum, five providers went through the entire six month with no outages at all.
From 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. Seven hosting companies went through the period with less than 0.01% of requests failing from our five measurement points.
Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.
August, the mother of all months, which contained Blaster, Sobig and the North East US power outage, effectively decided several of places in the top 10. Five of the 2003 top 10- AboveNet, Datapipe, iPowerWeb, Yahoo, and Tierranet had no outages at all during August, whereas a thirteen hour power outage put paid to New York Internet, which otherwise sat in the top 10 most of the year.
Four owner managed hosting companies will take considerable pride that Yahoo, with its colossal financial resources and economies of scale, did not come top, with INetU edging out Datapipe, IPowerWeb, and Pair Networks by virtue of an extremely reliable Q4, and faultless December.
July 1st - December 31st 2003
INetU, Cable and Wireless most reliable hosting company sites during December
1st January, 2004
December 1st - 31st 2003
During December both the INetU and Cable & Wireless sites were faultless with no failed requests at all from any of our five measurement points.
INetU's site has been consistently highly ranked throughout Q4 2003, and has now been in the top three for the last three months running. As neither INetU or Cable and Wireless had any failed requests, INetU is ranked above Cable & Wireless because the average connection time from our performance measurment points to the INetU site was faster.
Cable and Wireless, located in Swindon is the hosting company site that is geographically closest to Netcraft, but it does not enjoy any special advantage because of this; there is only one performance collection point in the UK, which is in London.
Sites running on BSD operating systems occupied four out of the first seven places.