Ike.ninja

Datapipe had the most reliable website of all monitored hosting providers, responding to every single request made by Netcraft from its 11 monitoring points distributed across North America and Europe. Datapipe.net achieves such rapid average connection times — meaning that it often wins the top spot even when otherwise tied on failed requests — by serving content from the server topologically closest to the client. Datapipe’s Stratosphere platform is available in five global data centres allowing its clients to benefit from similar performance.

Qube, ranked second this month, also with an exemplary record, with no failed requests recorded but a slightly longer average connection time. Qube has a number of notable clients, including both BetFair, an online gambling exchange, and blinkbox, a video streaming service in the UK, which trust it to provide a dependable network from its three data centres in London, New York, and Zurich.

UK2.net finished in third place, having just a single failed request. One of UK2.net’s flagship brands, VPS.net, released a newly redesigned website and logo on the last day in January. At the same time, UK2.net also announced a set of new promises for VPS.net customers including a 99.9% SLA for unmanaged customers and 100% for those with managed services.

Server Intellect are joined in the top ten this month by a fellow Windows-based hosting provider, Netcetera, appearing in the top ten for the 57th time, but the first time since September 2012.

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.

(Feb 3) A buffer overflow problem has been found in nagios3, a host/service/network monitoring and management system. A mailicious client could craft a request to history.cgi and cause application crashes. [More…]