Last updated: · Data collection in progress
What we measure
Every five minutes, monitoring probes in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia-Pacific request each provider's primary website over HTTPS. For each check we record whether the request succeeded (HTTP 200–399 within 30 seconds, following redirects) and how long the response took, per region. A provider is only marked unavailable when multiple probes in a region agree — a single flaky network path never counts as downtime. That is roughly 288 checks per provider per day, per region, for 90 days: about four million measurements across the study.
Measurement runs on FourSight, the uptime-monitoring platform built by TetraCore, the same company that operates this site. We're disclosing that relationship up front: it's why we can afford to run four-region quorum monitoring against 37 companies, and none of the monitored providers has any relationship with the measurement infrastructure.
What we deliberately do not claim
This study measures each provider's primary web presence — the site you visit to sign up, manage services, and reach support. It does not measure the uptime of customer servers hosted on these platforms. Those are different infrastructures: a host's marketing site can go down while customer workloads hum along, and vice versa. We think a company's own front door is still worth measuring — several of these providers host their main site on the very infrastructure they sell, and a company that can't keep its own site fast and reachable is showing you something — but we will never present these numbers as "hosting uptime." A phase-2 study measuring real hosted workloads (a test site on every provider) is on the roadmap if this one proves useful.
Who is being monitored
- Shared, managed & dedicated hosts (16)
- Hostinger, Cloudways, SiteGround, DreamHost, A2 Hosting, Bluehost, InMotion Hosting, Kinsta, WP Engine, Rocket.net, Pressable, Flywheel, Nexcess, Liquid Web, Hivelocity, Rackspace
- Cloud & VPS platforms (7)
- DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode (Akamai), Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, AWS Lightsail
- Email hosts (7)
- Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Proton Mail, Zoho Mail, Migadu, MXroute
- Domain registrars (7)
- Porkbun, Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, Dynadot, Hover, Gandi, Name.com
The list is exactly the set of providers reviewed on this site — nobody paid to be included and nobody can pay to be excluded.
Day-one finding: a fifth of providers block non-US automated traffic
Within hours of starting, the study produced its first result — about bot policy, not uptime. Seven of the 37 providers (Bluehost, Cloudways, InMotion Hosting, Linode, Namecheap, Nexcess, and Vultr) answered our US probes normally while rejecting the same requests from Canadian, European, and Asia-Pacific probe addresses with HTTP 403 bot-mitigation challenges. Two of them — Bluehost and Cloudways — challenge even robots.txt, the file explicitly published for automated readers.
Those 403s are edge security decisions, not outages, so counting them as downtime would be dishonest. We adjusted the methodology the same day, and disclose it here rather than quietly: the affected providers' homepage response-time measurement continues from the US region only, and where a provider's edge serves robots.txt globally (InMotion Hosting, Namecheap, Nexcess — plus WP Engine and Dynadot, which showed milder regional challenges), a four-region availability check runs against that instead.
Within hours, the picture sharpened further: Linode and Vultr began rejecting our US probe as well — reputation-based bot scoring flagged the measurement addresses entirely, Vultr including robots.txt. The same requests from a residential connection still return 200, so this is IP-reputation policy, not an outage. Rather than publish numbers we can't stand behind, Linode and Vultr are classified as "blocks automated measurement" and their monitors are paused; we will retest at each report date and say so if the policy changes. Bluehost and Cloudways remain measurable from the US only. So the day-one scoreboard: 33 of 37 providers fully measurable, four with partial or no automated measurability — which is itself a finding, and it will be reported as one.
How results will be published
- August 8, 2026
- Data collection started. Methodology published (this page).
- Early September 2026
- 30-day interim findings.
- Early November 2026
- The full 90-Day Provider Reliability Report.
Reports will include per-provider, per-region availability percentages, response-time medians and 95th percentiles, and every methodology adjustment made along the way, with dates. Raw aggregates will be available on request for anyone who wants to check our math. If a provider disputes a measurement, the contact page is open — we'll publish corrections with a changelog, the same policy as the rest of our methodology.