If this were the cupboard where the stars were kept for rewarding keen students, Forbes would be eagerly awaiting a gold one for their infrastructure support folks.

Monitoring service Pingdom found out of thirteen top news sites, only Forbes managed the trek from January 1 to June 30 without a mark against it due to downtime.

After Forbes, seven other news sites managed to keep their availability in the “three nines” range. Doing so meant they managed downtime to a little over four hours or less during the six-month period.

The UK’s Times Online won’t get a gold star for their downtime, worst among the thirteen sites assessed by Pingdom. The Times Online suffered nearly 24 hours of downtime in the first half of the year.

“Millions of people visit these websites every day to read up on current events. If one of them is down, basically any time, day or night, a lot of people are bound to notice,” said Pingdom.

Three other sites experienced double-digit downtime over the course of the first six months, though none were over 15 hours of downtime.

Thieves and raccoons plagued people with their activities. The innocent victims? Wires, of the electrical and telecom variety.

A post at Royal Pingdom collected a busy week’s worth of outages induced by an assortment of means. Trucks figured in a couple of those, as one driver’s search for a dropped cellphone resulted in him taking out an electrical feeder line in a Montana town.

Another trucker plowed through a power line in Milestone, Saskatchewan, and yanked down four utility poles and a transformer. A power company spokesperson said in a report that fixing it was going to be expensive; pity the unfortunate driver.

While an adorable raccoon plowed into a Newport News transformer seeking warmth, which he likely found for a brief fraction of a second, the causes of losses of cable and telephone service in Memphis and in Hillsborough County, Florida, came about due to human intervention.

Comcast blamed random gunfire for the Memphis outage, while Verizon officials in Florida said copper thieves struck again when they pulled up 500 feet of cable.

These incidents should serve as a reminder to webmasters and site publishers that what can go wrong, may very well go wrong without notice. This would be a good time to review what a hosting provider promises in terms of uptime, backups, and SLA in the event of a disaster.

You could be a wayward bird away from an outage, and being on the hook for hours of unprovided service, so check wisely. If the terms of service don’t look right in the event of a disaster, clarifying them with the provider, or finding a new one, is a task best accomplished before an outage happens.