--- title: "Hosting Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings (2026) | Digital Hosting" description: "Interim results from 37 days of five-minute, four-region monitoring of major hosting providers: two real Namecheap outages, chronic slowness at Flywheel and WP Engine, and eleven providers with a spotless record." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "name": "Digital Hosting", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com", "potentialAction": { "@type": "SearchAction", "target": "https://digitalhosting.com/articles?q={search_term_string}", "query-input": "required name=search_term_string" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Digital Hosting", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com", "logo": "https://digitalhosting.com/og-image.png", "email": "hello@digitalhosting.com", "description": "Independent hosting review site — comparisons for web hosting, VPS, WordPress hosting, business email, and domain registration. Not a hosting provider.", "parentOrganization": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "TetraCore", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "addressLocality": "Bowling Green", "addressRegion": "OH", "addressCountry": "US" } } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings", "description": "Interim results from 37 days of five-minute, four-region monitoring of major hosting providers: two real Namecheap outages, chronic slowness at Flywheel and WP Engine, and eleven providers with a spotless record.", "datePublished": "2026-09-14", "dateModified": "2026-09-14", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://digitalhosting.com/articles/uptime-study-interim-report", "image": "https://digitalhosting.com/og-uptime-interim.png", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "W. Miller", "jobTitle": "Editor", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com/about#authors", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Digital Hosting", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com" } }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Digital Hosting", "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com/og-image.png" } } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "Does this measure the uptime of sites hosted on these providers?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "No. The study measures each provider's primary web presence — the site you visit to sign up, manage services, and reach support. Customer workloads run on different infrastructure. We publish these numbers as what they are, never as \"hosting uptime.\"" } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Why should I trust numbers with excluded windows?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Because the exclusions are the trust mechanism: every removed window is dated, has a stated reason, and is backed by retained probe evidence (HTTP codes, response times, per-region results). Bot-wall 403s in under 100 ms are not outages, and counting them would smear providers. We'd rather show the seams than publish false downtime." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "Were Namecheap's outages real, given the bot-blocking problems?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Yes. The two outages returned HTTP 503 — a service error — from all four regions simultaneously, on the monitor that was passing normally before and after. The bot-block artifacts show a different signature entirely (HTTP 403 in tens of milliseconds), and the one blocked window on that monitor is excluded from the totals." } }, { "@type": "Question", "name": "When is the final report due?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "The full 90-day report is due in early November 2026, covering the complete window with per-provider, per-region availability percentages and response-time percentiles. Interim standings can change — 53 days of measurement remain." } } ] }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://digitalhosting.com/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Articles", "item": "https://digitalhosting.com/articles" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings", "item": "https://digitalhosting.com/articles/uptime-study-interim-report" } ] } ] --- [![Digital Hosting logo](/__l5e/assets-v1/82d2596a-40de-45e5-9f43-9ce3b34f019c/digitalhosting-logo.png)](/) [Web Hosting](/best-web-hosting)[Cloud](/best-cloud-hosting)[VPS](/best-vps-hosting)[Dedicated](/best-dedicated-hosting)[WordPress](/best-wordpress-hosting)[Email](/best-email-hosting)[Domains](/best-domain-registrars) [Hosting Finder](/hosting-finder) Compare by category - [Web Hosting](/best-web-hosting) - [Cloud](/best-cloud-hosting) - [VPS](/best-vps-hosting) - [Dedicated](/best-dedicated-hosting) - [WordPress](/best-wordpress-hosting) - [Email](/best-email-hosting) - [Domains](/best-domain-registrars) Tools & editorial - [Hosting Finder](/hosting-finder) - [Articles & Guides](/articles) - [Renewal Price Index](/articles/hosting-renewal-prices) - [How We Test](/how-we-test) - [Glossary](/glossary) - [About](/about) [Find my best fit →](/hosting-finder) [Web Hosting](/best-web-hosting)[Cloud](/best-cloud-hosting)[VPS](/best-vps-hosting)[Dedicated](/best-dedicated-hosting)[WordPress](/best-wordpress-hosting)[Email](/best-email-hosting)[Domains](/best-domain-registrars) 1. [Home](/)/ 2. [Articles](/articles)/ 3. Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings Data · Uptime Study · Data project # The Uptime Study: 30-Day Interim Findings On August 8 we began measuring the primary web presence of every provider we review, every five minutes, from four continents, with the methodology published before any results. This is the interim report, covering August 8 through September 14 — 37 days and roughly 390,000 consolidated availability decisions. It covers real outages, chronic slowness, the providers that were flawless, and — because honest measurement means showing the seams — exactly what we excluded and why. Last updated: September 14, 2026 By: [W. Miller](/about#authors), Editor, Digital Hosting — reviewed independently by the Digital Hosting editorial team. Disclosure: Digital Hosting may earn a commission when you buy through our links. This does not affect our recommendations. Summary verdict ## The 37-day picture Only one provider suffered major multi-region outages: Namecheap went down twice — about 9.3 hours on August 13 and another 3.8 hours on September 1, both returning HTTP 503 from every region we probe — roughly 13 hours of hard downtime, or about 98.5% availability for the window. Nobody else came close on hard downtime: OVHcloud logged ~6.5 hours across four shorter episodes and Hetzner ~1.5 hours across five blips. The chronic-slowness story is different: Flywheel recorded 202 degraded episodes (~85 hours of slow responses, near-daily), and WP Engine — its premium sibling brand — recorded 46 (~19 hours). Eleven providers finished the window with zero incidents of any kind. What the data shows ## Findings 37 days of five-minute, four-region monitoring (Aug 8 – Sep 14, 2026) ~390,000 consolidated availability decisions across the provider fleet 2 outages verified major multi-region outages — both belonging to Namecheap 11 providers finished the window with zero incidents of any kind Failure mode one — unreachable Verified hard downtime, in minutes Requests failing outright, with a majority of probe regions agreeing. Every provider not shown recorded zero hard downtime. Window Aug 8 – Sep 14, 2026. Bot-block and threshold artifact windows excluded per the dated methodology disclosures on the uptime-study page. Degraded (slow) time is never counted as downtime. Failure mode two — slow Degraded (slow-response) time, in hours The site answered successfully but slowly — a different failure from downtime, charted separately on purpose. Top ten shown; nine further providers logged under an hour each. Window Aug 8 – Sep 14, 2026. Bot-block and threshold artifact windows excluded per the dated methodology disclosures on the uptime-study page. Degraded (slow) time is never counted as downtime. The clean list — zero incidents in 37 days - [AWS Lightsail](/providers/aws-lightsail) - [Cloudflare Registrar](/providers/cloudflare-registrar) - [DigitalOcean](/providers/digitalocean) - [Gandi](/providers/gandi) - [Google Workspace](/providers/google-workspace) - [Hostinger](/providers/hostinger) - [MXroute](/providers/mxroute) - [Name.com](/providers/name-com) - [Pressable](/providers/pressable) - [Rocket.net](/providers/rocket-net) - [SiteGround](/providers/siteground) ## How to read these numbers 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. ## Hard downtime: Namecheap's two outages lead the field 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. ## Chronic slowness: Flywheel, with WP Engine behind it 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. ## The clean list: eleven providers, zero incidents 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. ## What we excluded, and why 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. ### Best fit for - + Anyone weighing providers on evidence instead of marketing uptime claims - + Readers who want outage numbers with dates, HTTP codes, and stated exclusions - + Journalists and forum posters who need a citable, dated reliability snapshot ### Consider another option if - − You need customer-workload uptime — this study measures each provider's own web presence, not hosted servers - − You want a final verdict; this is an interim read at day 37 of 90, and standings can change Questions readers ask ## FAQ Does this measure the uptime of sites hosted on these providers? + No. The study measures each provider's primary web presence — the site you visit to sign up, manage services, and reach support. Customer workloads run on different infrastructure. We publish these numbers as what they are, never as "hosting uptime." Why should I trust numbers with excluded windows? + Were Namecheap's outages real, given the bot-blocking problems? + When is the final report due? + Keep reading ## Related on Digital Hosting - [The Uptime Study: methodology → How the measurement works, published before any results — with every adjustment dated. ](/uptime-study) - [The Hosting Renewal Price Index → What the premium-priced hosts on the slowness list charge at renewal. ](/articles/hosting-renewal-prices) - [How We Test → The review methodology behind the provider roster. ](/how-we-test) WM Written and reviewed by [W. Miller](/about#authors) — Editor, Digital Hosting W. Miller is the editor of Digital Hosting and oversees TetraCore's review sites. Every price on this site is verified against the vendor's public pricing page and dated; nothing is scored on marketing claims. 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