The Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings

The clean list — zero incidents in 37 days

• AWS Lightsail
• Cloudflare Registrar
• DigitalOcean
• Gandi
• Google Workspace
• Hostinger
• MXroute
• Name.com
• Pressable
• Rocket.net
• SiteGround

Probes in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia-Pacific request each provider's site every five minutes. A provider is only marked down when a majority of regions agree — a single flaky network path never counts. "Down" means requests failed outright (connection failures or HTTP error status); "degraded" means the site answered successfully but slowly. We report the two separately, because a slow page and an unreachable one are different failures.

The observation window is August 8, 18:00 UTC through September 14, 2026 — about 53,000 minutes per provider. The full methodology, including every mid-study adjustment with dates, lives on the uptime-study page linked below.

Namecheap is the only provider in the study with major multi-region outages — two of them. On August 13 its site returned HTTP 503 from all four regions from 12:33 to 21:49 UTC, roughly 9.3 hours. On September 1 the same signature repeated from 07:19 to 11:05 UTC, another 3.8 hours. Combined that is about 13 hours of hard downtime in 37 days — roughly 98.5% availability, a full order of magnitude more downtime than any other provider we measured.

The rest of the hard-downtime list is short. OVHcloud was unreachable for about 6.5 hours in total across four separate episodes (connection failures from every region, the largest on August 28). Hetzner logged five brief episodes totaling about 89 minutes. Dynadot had a single 29-minute outage on August 27, and DreamHost a single 18-minute one. No other provider in the study recorded any hard downtime at all.

Flywheel is the study's defining slowness story: 202 degraded episodes in 37 days — a near-daily pattern, worst from our Asia-Pacific probes — adding up to roughly 85 hours in which its site answered but slowly. Nothing else in the field looks like it.

The number two chronic performer is WP Engine, Flywheel's premium-priced sibling brand: 46 degraded episodes totaling about 19 hours, including an August 21–22 cluster of repeated 44–73-minute episodes. For hosts positioned and priced on performance, the pairing is notable — and it echoes what our renewal-price index shows about paying premium rates.

Behind those two: Nexcess logged 29 degraded episodes (~8 hours), A2 Hosting 14 (concentrated August 18–21), Scaleway 11, and DreamHost 11 — all patterns worth watching through the final report, none in Flywheel's class.

Eleven providers went the full 37 days with zero recorded incidents of any kind — no downtime, no degraded episodes: AWS Lightsail, Cloudflare Registrar, DigitalOcean, Gandi, Google Workspace, Hostinger, MXroute, Name.com, Pressable, Rocket.net, and SiteGround.

A further handful were near-spotless with a single-digit-minute blemish: Hivelocity, Kinsta, Liquid Web, Migadu, and Fastmail each logged one or two brief degraded episodes totaling under 35 minutes across the entire window.

Publishing bad data would be worse than publishing none, so here is everything we removed from the statistics, with dates. All of it is also disclosed on the methodology page, and the underlying probe evidence is retained.

First: from August 31, 19:15 UTC, the five providers measurable only from our US probe (Bluehost, Cloudways, InMotion Hosting, Namecheap, Nexcess) began returning HTTP 403 to that probe — their bot-mitigation had flagged its network address. Being single-region monitors, no other region could outvote the block, and they recorded ten days of false 'downtime' before our September 10 audit caught it. Every request in that window returned 403 in under 100 ms — a bot-wall's signature, not an outage's — and all five sites answered normally from ordinary residential connections throughout. The window is excluded for those five monitors; availability measurement for InMotion, Namecheap, and Nexcess continued unbroken on their separate four-region checks.

Second: Namecheap's four-region check itself was bot-blocked for one window — September 8, 18:10 to September 9, 07:31 UTC, all four regions returning 403 in tens of milliseconds. Excluded on the same evidence standard. The two real Namecheap outages reported above show the opposite signature: HTTP 503 service errors, the same code its edge served during its verified August 13 incident.

Third, smaller items: a 40-minute false alarm at study start on August 8 (the same five providers' bot-walls rejecting non-US probes before we narrowed those monitors to US-only — the config change disclosed on day one); and Microsoft 365's monitor, which spent much of September nominally 'degraded' because its response times oscillate right around our 3.0-second threshold while returning HTTP 200 from every region — a threshold artifact we've flagged for tuning, and in any case degraded time is never counted as downtime.

Finally, a roster change: Bluehost and Cloudways now block our probes entirely — homepage and robots.txt alike, from every region and every address we measure from — and as of September 14 they are dropped from the study rather than guessed at. That itself is a finding: of 37 providers, three (Vultr since day one, now Bluehost and Cloudways) do not permit independent automated measurement at all. The study continues with 34.