Uptime Champs

There's always interesting news in the monthly Web Server Survey from Netcraft, a UK-based performance monitoring firm. The January 2003 survey reveals that a site running on a Windows 2000 server has made Netcraft's list of sites with the longest continuous "uptime" without a server reboot. But that immediately got me wondering - which site owns the bragging rights for the longest uptime on the Internet?

According to Netcraft's Top 50 survey, the honor goes to the Yamagata Chamber of Commerce in Japan, hosted by Hopemoon Internet, which has gone 1,455 days (nearly four years) without a server reboot.

The top North American contender, at No. 10, is Berg.org, a simple personal site hosted by Minneapolis ISP Vector Internet Services, which has continuous uptime of 1,255 days. Vector also has a Quake server that has gone more than 1,000 days without a reboot. Another local hosting company with a server on the list is db Technology, which provides Internet services in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Larger US providers with servers boasting uninterrupted uptime of at least two years included Sprint, Exodus, Verio and Intac Access, as well as New Agora Corporation (which hosts the LightReading site and other technology publications).

Perhaps most interesting, however, was the presence of a number of organizations that appear to be running their serves in-house, including the City of Kobe (Japan), Tuscon Newspapers (parent of the Arizona Star), and the Merrimack County Telephone Company of Contoocook, NH.

What do these results tell us about uptime trends? Nothing conclusive, of course. But it documents that when it comes to uptime, small providers running Apache and BSD/FreeBSD can go toe-to-toe with industry heavyweights.