Obviously, when choosing a web hosting provider, server reliability should be crucial in your decision. An offline site can anger potential visitors, plus a site that frequently goes down can reduce search engine rankings if spiders visit the site when it is not able to serve information.

While web hosting providers can offer uptime guarantees, these may not cover true monetary loss against a malfunctioning site. Thus, how can you be sure a provider you are considering is reliable enough to host your personal, organization, or business site?

Netcraft, a UK web services company, offers uptime information for several dozen top hosting companies. Daily updated information includes the percentage of failed requests, average time to connect, average time when the first byte of a response is received, and total time to receive. Performance graphs are also available. And for those who would rather see summary results, Netcraft also provides monthly reports on the most reliable hosting companies according to their metrics.

Netcraft: Hosting Providers sites ordered by failures: http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters

Netcraft: Performance Archives: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/performance.html

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