Incorporated in 1998, NaviSite provides application solutions and hosting services using its web infrastructure platforms in 18 data centers. The company announced last month it formed an alliance with Intel to offer a range of managed services through Intel's value added reseller community.

Coming in second position is DataPipe (datapipe.com), which made the survey's top ten on 11 occassions last year. Falling from last month's top position as the most reliable hosting company site, INetU came in third place this month.

Three Web hosts in April's top ten, which includes NaviSite, operate on Linux on their main sites, while another three use FreeBSD, and one company uses Windows Server 2003.

Each month, Netcraft calculates and posts the response times of 50 leading hosting providers' sites. The measurements are made at 15 minute intervals from separate points around the Internet, and averages are assessed 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 April, Netcraft announced that INetU was the most reliable hosting company site for March 2008, followed by Express Technologies, Pair Networks, DataPipe and Swishmail.