| Rank | Performance Graph | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
| 1 | Qube Managed Services | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.004 | 0.105 | 0.036 | 0.074 | 0.074 |
| 2 | Host Europe | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.012 | 0.110 | 0.072 | 0.149 | 0.150 |
| 3 | XILO Communications Ltd. | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.015 | 0.202 | 0.066 | 0.131 | 0.226 |
| 4 | Netcetera | Windows Server 2012 | 0:00:00 | 0.015 | 0.065 | 0.071 | 0.157 | 0.295 |
| 5 | New York Internet | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.015 | 0.145 | 0.071 | 0.148 | 0.555 |
| 6 | ServerStack | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.015 | 0.079 | 0.074 | 0.146 | 0.146 |
| 7 | Datapipe | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.019 | 0.102 | 0.018 | 0.037 | 0.054 |
| 8 | Swishmail | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.019 | 0.127 | 0.070 | 0.141 | 0.186 |
| 9 | Logicworks | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.019 | 0.149 | 0.071 | 0.148 | 0.299 |
| 10 | Webzilla | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.023 | 0.127 | 0.071 | 0.140 | 0.355 |
Qube had the most reliable hosting company site in April, with only one failed request. The London-based managed hosting provider uses data centres in the UK, USA and Switzerland, all of which are ISO 27001 certified. This information security management system standard uses a three-stage external audit process to ensure the company has suitable security policies and risk treatment plans.
Qube (which stands for “Qualified By Experience”) has performed rather well so far this year — it also had the most reliable hosting company site in February (with no failed requests), narrowly missed out on first place in January, and made 4th place in March. Qube provides a Virtual Data Centre cloud computing service powered by VMware vCloud, managed dedicated servers, and managed colocation in its Tier 3 central London data centre.
Host Europe had the second most reliable hosting company site in April, with three isolated failed requests from Netcraft’s globally distributed performance collectors. The company has attained 100% uptime over the past six months, and 99.98% uptime over 12 months. The Host Europe Group also owns the largest domain name provider in the UK, 123-reg, which recently teamed up with Knowhow to offer domain and website building packages from Currys and PC World stores.
XILO Communications came third in April, with four failed requests. Its uptime over the past 12 months is an impressive 99.993%. Netcetera, New York Internet, and ServerStack also had only four failed requests, but with longer average connection times than XILO.
Half of April’s top ten hosting company websites were served from Linux machines, including all of the top three. Four of the other sites used FreeBSD, and one used Windows Server 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.