Netcraft's hosting company sites study showed that Acens, Hosting 4 Less, ReliableServers.com and Swishmail tied for the most reliable for March.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Web analytics firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com) has named Acens, Hosting 4 Less, ReliableServers.com and Swishmail the most reliable hosting company sites for March, with each site failing to respond to only two of the requests made by Netcraft’s performance collectors.
A single, clear winner of the survey has been becoming increasingly hard to determine in the past few months. Eight hosting companies shared the top spot in Netcraft’s November survey of the most reliable hosting company sites, each showing only one failed request throughout the month. In its December survey, Netcraft named New York Internet (www.nyi.net) and WestHost (www.westhost.com) the most reliable hosting company sites for the month. Aplus.net (www.aplus.net), NYI, and ZeroLag Communications (www.zerolag.com) all tied for first place as the most reliable hosting company sites in January after recording absolutely no failed requests.
Netcraft’s ranking system is based on the number of failed requests, with results averaged over each day. According to Netcraft, the percentage of failed requests is more important to customers than shortest periods of outage, because it gives a pointer to the reliability of their routing.
Topping the list for the first first time in March, New York email and web hosting provider Swishmail (www.swishmail.com) has consistently been in the top ten since entering the running for Netcraft’s most reliable hosting company site in August 2008. Its main website is served by nginx running on FreeBSD.
March marks the third month in the past six that (aptly named) ReliableServers.com (www.reliableservers.com) made the top ten, with its front page, served by Apache on FreeBSD, coming in first place after finishing seventh last month, fifth in January and fourth in October.
Running Apache on Linux, California-based web hosting and online backup provider Hosting 4 Less (www.hosting4less.com) made top spot after being in the top ten three times in the last six months.
Placing first for the first time since August 2007, Spanish web hosting, colocation and networking provider Acens (www.acens.com) also placed first, running Apache on Linux. Acens was one of three European companies to make this month’s top-ten list.
Last month’s most reliable hosting site, NYI, dropped to sixth place in March.
