Rackspace is the most reliable hosting company, followed closely by managed hosting company Datapipe and Katarre, a colocation and dedicated hosting provider, according to a fall of 2006 study by Netcraft. 

Rackspace, a managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, Texas, , has been a mainstay in reliability rankings since tracking of hosting company performance in 2003. This is the fifth time this year that Rackspace has been the most reliable hoster, compared to six times in 2005. The home page for the Rackspace.com web site did not have a measurable outage from March 2004 through November 2005, when it experienced three minutes of downtime. 

Eight of the 10 most reliable hosters run their sites on Linux with the two remaining having Unknown OS. 

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of 50 leading hosting providers’ sites. The performance measurements are made at 15 minute intervals from separate points around the Internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period. 

Netcraft says from a customers’ point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on the hosting companies’ own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why they choose to rank by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage.