Mon.itor.Us was monitoring approximately 70,000 customer Web sites in 2007. A considerable amount of data was analyzed and hosting providers were ranked based on their Web site’s aggregated performance. Mon.itor.Us provides a reliable indicator of overall ISP/hosting provider performance.

Businesses quickly became dependent on the Internet, and hosting turned into a commodity in 2007. There are many Internet service providers all claiming fast and reliable connections. In fact, not all ISPs are the same and there’s more to compare than cost. How do you choose the right company to best serve your needs?

Answering such a question would be relatively easy if performance measurements such as uptime, speed and popularity of ISPs could be accurately compared. Current studies suggests an approach that can be used for understanding ISP reliability and performance indicators.

There are many web-hosting reviews and ratings based on different methodologies. The most common are reviews available in forums such as www.hostingdiscussion.com, www.webhostingtalk.com or http://resellerboard.com/. Some information is available on publishers’ networks (such as http://www.paidonresults.com, www.websitepublisher.net, or www.cj.com), though this type of evaluation can be biased toward providers who advertise on those networks. The evaluations are either customer comments or reviews about hosting companies.

Hosting companies also provide ratings about their service as well as their own forums.

Web directories collect information about hosting companies as well: www.findmyhosting.com or www.webhostingrating.com.

Mon.itor.Us, is providing free Web site and server monitoring, collects and analyzes real time data on availability and performance for ISPs using the Mon.itor.Us monitoring network data. More than 70,000 sites are being monitored by HTTP, PING, HTTPS, FTP, POP3, SMTP, DNS, TCP, UDP, IMAP and SIP tests. Forty thousand are HTTP tests. External server monitoring checks are performed from three geographic locations: The USA, Germany and Austria. Information about server availability and response time is checked every 30 minutes.

For HTTP tests Mon.itor.Us assumes the server is available if HTTP response headers are received in 10 seconds. Otherwise the server being monitored is deemed ‘not available’. Response time is the duration between sending a request and receiving the HTTP response header.

The period for this study is from mid-August to December 2007. During that period, more than 1.2 billion checks were performed, including approximately 900 million HTTP checks. Mon.itor.Us created aggregated test results for each site by calculating the sum of all OK answers, server response times and total request counts. Results were categorized by the number of tests per ISP, ISP average uptime and ISP average response time.

For each test Mon.itor.Us determined server IP and found ISP using Maxmind (www.maxmind.com) service. Maxmind provides two main databases of ISPs: GeoIP ISPs that verifies the IP address of an Internet Service Provider and GeoIP Organization that verifies the organization origin for thousands of corporate networks and the name of the ISP for home users. Mon.itor.Us used ISP Organizations.

This report isn’t intended to evaluate the providers’ hosting service because there are more important criteria such as price and available features. The report we offer measures uptime and performance of all servers that belong to ISP by IP range. Mon.itor.US provides an average real measurement of uptime and performance from a user perspective.

Using to the data obtained, Mon.itor.Us observed the ISPs from three conditions: Popularity, Availability and Response time.

Why is popularity of ISP important? In an effort to save money, some companies have chosen to go with small operators more likely to go out of business. Many internet service providers disappear after few years in operation and many others were built to make quick returns. Companies need to build on ISPs that will last. Serious businesses consider established industry leaders.

Table 1

Among the Mon.itor.Us community, the most popular ISP is New Dream Network, LLC. The table below shows that 1211 sites using New Dream Network’s services are monitored by Mon.itor.Us. The second most popular company within the Mon.itor.Us community is ThePlanet.com Internet Services that has 979 sites in the Mon.itor.Us network. ThePlanet.com also showed high speed connection from all locations according to the Table 5.

Interesting to note is the trend corresponding to April’s Mon.itor.Us Internet Service Providers Ranking by Uptime and Availability report. The following hosting providers appeared in the top 20 in almost identical ranking. With very few exceptions: New Dream Network, LLC, Schlund + Partner AG, Everyones Internet, GoDaddy.com, Layered Technologies, Ovh Systems, SoftLayer Technologies, Google Inc., MEDIA TEMPLE, Global Net Access, Rackspace.com, Net Access Corporation and Hetzner Online AG. Bluehost, Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting, HostDime.comthat have 233, 230, 224 websites monitored be Mon.itor.Us, appeared in the top 20 during the time of our study from which Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting also showed 99.67% uptime from Europe according to the Table 4, also high speed connection from all locations and from the USA in particular, as shown in Tables 5 and 6.

Second, a good service provider must provide high uptime or availability.

Uptime is a percentage of time ISP service is running properly to keep your Web site and applications available to your clients. Obviously, an ISP has to offer high level service in order for businesses to signup. All service providers claim to provide fast and reliable connections, but not all Internet service providers are the same. Many of them promise 99.9 percent uptime. And businesses must choose an Internet service provider that keeps them connected.

In the Mon.itor.Us report, uptime does not mean Hosting Provider uptime. It is real uptime of all the Web sites and applications hosted at that ISP from the users perspective. For this reason, Mon.itor.Us calculated average uptime could be less than the Hosting providers’ uptime. For example, dedicated server total downtime will always be higher. Total Downtime = ISP downtime + HTTP Service downtime. In most cases a Hosting Provider is not responsible for HTTP Service downtime or DB downtime. Another limitation is: if an application hosted at the hosting center stays unchanged it will show the same uptime as the Hosting provider. But in real situations applications are being upgraded, and new uploads and releases are deployed on the server. In some occasions system level configurations are required which is Hosting providers’ responsibility. Thus the Hosting provider service (time to fix the problem) also are reflected in the uptime figures.

According to Mon.itor.Us, ISP uptime is ranked based on ISPs that have more than 100 sites monitored by HTTP checks. In total, 43 hosting companies were chosen.

Table 2

Based on the data from three geographic locations, the nine ISP organizations in Table 2 above provided 99.5 percent or higher availability during the reporting period: Akamai International B.V., Rackspace.com, Google, Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting, Hosteurope GmbH, ADDD2NET COM INC DBA LUNARPAGES, iPowerweb, Liquid Web and 1&1 Internet.

Almost all of the same ISP organizations showed 99.5 percent and higher uptime from different geographic locations (shown in Table 3 and 4).

Table 3

Table 4

The third condition of assessing ISP quality is performance. This is a measure of response time or speed of the Internet connection provided. The average response time per provider is calculated based on an aggregated average of each of the Web sites’ response time from all geographic locations.

The table below shows which providers offer higher quality performance (less than 400 milliseconds response time) from all three geographic locations combined.

Table 5

In general, we should also consider that the data obtained in Europe has more weight in total result since Mon.itor.Us has two monitoring locations there.

In addition, Mon.itor.Us created a report on fastest ISPs per USA and European geographic locations (see Table 6 and 7).

Table 6

Table 7

Real monitoring results of 43 hosting providers derived from the Mon.itor.Us monitoring network reveals that among the 20 most popular companies, two provide 99.5 percent or higher uptime and fast and reliable connection from almost all locations. They are: Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and Rackspace.com, which appeared in all tables, but the last one. Google for example, is among the most popular ISPs and provides more than 99.5 percent uptime from all geographic locations, but the site’s average load speed is lower than 400 ms from all the locations. Strato Rechenzentrum, Berlin and Hetzner Online AG are among the 20 most popular ISP organizations and provided quite a high-speed connection from Europe, but their uptime was lower than 99.5 percent.

The Mon.itor.Us report is not the ultimate solution to help businesses find a reliable hosting company. Each business should choose a provider based on their own needs assessment. This study provides an angle of looking at the ISPs, and assessing their actual performance on the Internet.

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