Netcraft Hosting Provider Performance Monitoring

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of 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.

Note: Outage times display the minimum outage time which may understate each outage by up to 15 minutes, which is the sampling frequency.

If you are reseaching prospective hosting locations, or performing competitor analysis and would like to buy bespoke performance monitoring of sites of your choice, or access to historical data, please mail us at sales@netcraft.com

Interpreting the Tables

Using the performance of a hosting provider's own site to determine the performance of the hosting companies network, is only indicative. By default the sites are ranked in order of failed requests and time to connect, shortest first, in order to give the clearest indication of network capacity and congestion, with the least impact from the performance of the companies' own web servers, though it is possible to sort by any column by clicking on the column heading.

Presently our performance collectors are located at London/DXI Networks, New York/New York Internet, Pennsylvania/INetU-2, Virginia/Rackspace, San Jose/Datapipe, Vancouver/Peer1, Phoenix/GoDaddy, Italy/Aruba, Romania/Hostway, Zurich/Qube and Amsterdam/Webair. These companies have an advantage over the other companies listed in the table, as each of them have a collector in their own datacenter. Companies in the Far East are at a disadvantage as we do not currently have a performance collector in the region.

Companies using a caching system such as Akamai would have a particular advantage as the response to our request would come from the Akamai server closest to each performance collector.

If you are using the table as a guide when choosing where to locate a dedicated or collocated server, remember that connection times fluctuate continually, and only hundredths of a second separate the top companies. Avoiding companies showing prolonged outages is likely to be a better strategy than necessarily going for the company with the fastest connection time.

Other factors including availability and quality of support, and price will also be important. If you are considering shared hosting then the load on the shared hosting system will likely be a greater constraint on the performance of your site than network connection time.

More information can be found in the FAQ.