--- title: "Uptime Study: 45-Day Findings | Digital Hosting" url: https://digitalhosting.com/articles/uptime-study-interim-report description: "45 days of five-minute checks from four continents: two verified major outages, 10 of 34 providers with a clean sheet, and Flywheel at 209 slow episodes." lang: en --- Data · Uptime Study Data project # The Uptime Study: 45-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, refreshed to cover August 8 through September 22 — 45 days and roughly 460,000 consolidated availability decisions. It covers real outages, chronic slowness, the providers that were flawless, two corrections to our own 30-day report, and — because honest measurement means showing the seams — exactly what we excluded and why. Last updated: September 23, 2026 By: W. Miller (https://digitalhosting.com/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 45-day picture Only one provider has 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 98.8% availability across the window. The newest name on the hard-downtime list is Dynadot, clean apart from one 29-minute outage until the weekend of September 19–21, when it logged seven more (the longest 90 minutes) for 381 minutes in total. OVHcloud sits at about 7 hours across five episodes and Hetzner at about 1.5 hours across five blips. The chronic-slowness story is unchanged at the top: Flywheel has recorded 209 degraded episodes (~87 hours of slow responses, near-daily) and WP Engine — its premium sibling brand — 46 (~19 hours), while Hover has moved sharply up the table to 25 episodes (~13 hours), most of them since September 21. Ten providers have finished the window with zero incidents of any kind — and, in a correction to the 30-day report, Rackspace should have been on that list all along. What the data shows ## Findings 45 days of five-minute, four-region monitoring (Aug 8 – Sep 22, 2026) ~460,000 consolidated availability decisions across the provider fleet 2 outages verified major multi-region outages — both belonging to Namecheap 10 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 22, 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 10 shown; 10 further providers logged less. Window Aug 8 – Sep 22, 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 45 days - AWS Lightsail: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/aws-lightsail - DigitalOcean: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/digitalocean - Gandi: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/gandi - Google Workspace: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/google-workspace - Hostinger: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/hostinger - Name.com: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/name-com - Pressable: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/pressable - Rackspace: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/rackspace - Rocket.net: https://digitalhosting.com/providers/rocket-net - SiteGround: https://digitalhosting.com/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 22, 2026 — about 64,800 minutes per provider. The full methodology, including every mid-study adjustment with dates, lives on the uptime-study page linked below. As of this refresh every figure is generated by a scripted pipeline from the study's incident records, with the exclusions applied as dated rules, rather than compiled by hand. ## 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 45 days — roughly 98.8% availability — and still more downtime than any other provider we measured, though the gap has narrowed since the 30-day report. The rest of the list has grown. Dynadot had a single 29-minute outage on August 27 and nothing else for three weeks; then, between the early hours of September 19 and the morning of September 21, it went down seven more times — 90, 28, 39, 59, 41, 23 and 72 minutes — for 381 minutes in total. None was long enough to count as a major outage, but together they put Dynadot third on the list, and its separate four-region robots.txt check confirmed two of the September 21 episodes independently. OVHcloud was unreachable for about 7 hours across five separate episodes (connection failures from every region; the longest, about 2.9 hours, on September 8; the newest on September 17). Hetzner logged five brief episodes totaling about 89 minutes, all in the first half of September, and DreamHost a single 18-minute one on August 29. No other provider in the study recorded any hard downtime. ## Chronic slowness: Flywheel, with WP Engine behind it Flywheel remains the study's defining slowness story: 209 degraded episodes in 45 days — a near-daily pattern, worst from our Asia-Pacific probes — adding up to roughly 87 hours in which its site answered but slowly. Nothing else in the field looks like it. The number two chronic performer is still WP Engine, Flywheel's premium-priced sibling brand: 46 degraded episodes totaling about 19 hours, unchanged since the 30-day report, including an August 21–22 cluster of repeated 44–73-minute episodes. For hosts positioned and priced on performance, the pairing remains notable — and it echoes what our renewal-price index shows about paying premium rates. The mover is Hover. At day 37 it had 8 degraded episodes and about 3 hours; it now has 25 and about 13 hours, with 17 of those episodes and most of the time concentrated on September 21–22, the longest running 73–75 minutes. Behind those three: Nexcess logged 32 degraded episodes (~9 hours, measured on its four-region edge check), A2 Hosting 14 (concentrated August 18–21), DreamHost 14, Scaleway 11, and MXroute — spotless at day 37 — six episodes since September 21. All are patterns worth watching through the final report; none is in Flywheel's class. ## The clean list: ten providers, zero incidents Ten providers have gone the full 45 days with zero recorded incidents of any kind — no downtime, no degraded episodes: AWS Lightsail, DigitalOcean, Gandi, Google Workspace, Hostinger, Name.com, Pressable, Rackspace, Rocket.net, and SiteGround. Two providers that were spotless at day 37 have since picked up a blemish: Cloudflare Registrar logged a single 12-minute degraded episode, and MXroute the six noted above. A further group remains near-spotless: Hivelocity, Kinsta and Liquid Web have each logged exactly one brief degraded episode of 11–12 minutes across the entire window, Migadu two totaling 22 minutes, and Fastmail two totaling 34 minutes. ## Corrections to the 30-day report Our methodology page promises corrections with a changelog, so here they are. First and most important: the 30-day report said eleven providers had zero incidents. The correct number was twelve. Rackspace's homepage monitor ran the full window on all four regions, was never paused or in maintenance, and recorded no incidents of any kind; it was left off the published list by a hand-compilation error, not by the data. It is on the list above, where it belonged all along. Second, a smaller one: the 30-day report described OVHcloud's longest outage as falling on August 28. It fell on September 8 and lasted about 2.9 hours; the August 28 episode was about 71 minutes. The totals were correct. This refresh is the first produced by a scripted pipeline rather than by hand. Every figure is generated from the study's incident records with the exclusions applied as dated rules, and the same script will produce the 60-day update and the final report. The error above is exactly the class of mistake it exists to prevent. ## 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 45 of 90, and standings can change Questions readers ask ## FAQ 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." Keep reading ## Related on Digital Hosting - The Uptime Study: methodology → How the measurement works, published before any results — with every adjustment dated.: https://digitalhosting.com/uptime-study - The Hosting Renewal Price Index → What the premium-priced hosts on the slowness list charge at renewal.: https://digitalhosting.com/articles/hosting-renewal-prices - How We Test → The review methodology behind the provider roster.: https://digitalhosting.com/how-we-test Written and reviewed by W. Miller (https://digitalhosting.com/about#authors) — Editor, Digital Hosting W. Miller is the founder of TetraCore, LLC, the software company that owns and publishes Digital Hosting, and has spent 35 years in software development, technology and related services, including cloud and hosting. The uptime monitoring and price-collection infrastructure behind this site's original research is built and run in-house. See our affiliate disclosure (https://digitalhosting.com/affiliate-disclosure) and how we test and score providers (https://digitalhosting.com/how-we-test). ## Structured data ```json [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "name": "Digital Hosting", "url": "https://digitalhosting.com" }, { "@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. 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Miller", "jobTitle": "Editor, Digital Hosting", "description": "Founder of TetraCore, LLC, publisher of Digital Hosting. 35 years in software development, technology and related services, including cloud and hosting.", "knowsAbout": [ "Web hosting", "Managed WordPress hosting", "VPS and cloud infrastructure", "Business email hosting", "Domain registration and renewal pricing", "Uptime and availability monitoring" ], "url": "https://digitalhosting.com/about#authors", "mainEntityOfPage": "https://digitalhosting.com/about#authors", "worksFor": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "TetraCore, LLC", "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 — 45 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: 45-Day Interim Findings", "item": "https://digitalhosting.com/articles/uptime-study-interim-report" } ] } ] ```