Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in April 2013
| Rank | Company site | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
| 1 | Swishmail | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.106 | 0.062 | 0.124 | 0.267 |
| 2 | INetU | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.125 | 0.073 | 0.236 | 0.454 |
| 3 | iWeb | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.003 | 0.127 | 0.071 | 0.142 | 0.142 |
| 4 | Server Intellect | Windows Server 2008 | 0:00:00 | 0.003 | 0.074 | 0.092 | 0.185 | 0.464 |
| 5 | Midphase | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.003 | 0.215 | 0.109 | 0.222 | 0.338 |
| 6 | Qube Managed Services | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.006 | 0.100 | 0.046 | 0.093 | 0.093 |
| 7 | Bigstep | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.006 | 0.266 | 0.071 | 0.143 | 0.143 |
| 8 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.006 | 0.252 | 0.074 | 0.145 | 0.151 |
| 9 | Datapipe | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.009 | 0.068 | 0.016 | 0.032 | 0.049 |
| 10 | Pair Networks | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.016 | 0.231 | 0.077 | 0.157 | 0.486 |
Swishmail had the most reliable hosting company site in April 2013, with no failed requests. Swishmail has a presence in three New York data centres which proved to be resilient when Swishmail stayed online in October whilst being hit by Hurricane Sandy, despite New York being in the centre of much of the damage. Swishmail offers a variety of managed web hosting plans in addition to its core service of enterprise-grade email hosting. Swishmail has been monitored by Netcraft since April 2007.
In second place is INetU which also had no failed requests, but it missed the top spot by just 11ms due to using the average connect time as the tie-breaker. INetU offers dedicated managed hosting services and cloud hosting services from ten data centres in the US and Europe including a new data centre in Seattle. Netcraft has been monitoring INetU since June 2003.
iWeb is in third place again following last month’s success, it narrowly missed second place by having a single failed request. iWeb is based in Montréal where it has four data centres.
Newcomers Bigstep and Midphase have made their debut top 10 entries, after being monitored for one month and six months respectively. Hyve placed 8th this month, its third appearance since Netcraft began monitoring it in November having maintained 100% uptime over 5 months.
Swishmail, April’s most reliable hosting company, runs its site on FreeBSD. Two other sites in this month’s top ten are running FreeBSD – Datapipe, which was top last month and has an impressive 100% uptime over 7 years, and Pair Networks. Both INetU in second place, and Server Intellect in fourth place, are running Windows Server 2008. The remaining five – including iWeb in third place – use Linux.
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.