How do I find out how 'Fast' hosting is?

Posted by jdln on June 22, 2010 at 11:52am

Ive looked at loads of hosting companies. Its quite easy to compare price, storage space, etc. However how can I find out how 'fast' hosting is?

Is their any data on this or do I just need to go on reputation?

Im looking at hosting for my UK ecommerce site. The site will be small and my margins are (initially) quite slim. For usability and SEO I want fast page loading times, assuming this doesn't need to cost that much.

Im completely stumped so id appreciate any ideas before i take a shot in the dark here!
Thanks

Comments

Here is a tool to know the

Posted by seanray on June 22, 2010 at 1:50pm

Here is a tool to know the speed a site, you can take a try http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. But you need to find a site hosted in that server otherwise you can use the home page of your vendor for testing.

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Is this a good way to judge

Posted by jdln on June 22, 2010 at 2:22pm

Is this a good way to judge hosts? Presumable loading times will vary on the size of the page, how many visitors are currently on the site, etc.

Thanks

I agree that it would be nice

Posted by Dane Powell on June 22, 2010 at 8:38pm

I agree that it would be nice to know what typical query and page execution times are with various providers without having to go through trials with every one. I would even accept this through word-of-mouth as long as there was some quantitative data, and not just "Provider X works great with Drupal!"

No way to measure that

Posted by guidot on June 22, 2010 at 8:46pm

IMO there are too many different factors involved - many of them even change over time - to get something like THE speed.

The more you pay the faster it gets. The real question is: How fast do you need?

What I would do is look for some companies, especially the smaller ones (where people are more likely to being interested in satisfying the customer rather than just their boss), write them an e-mail describing what you are going to do with your webspace/(v)server (like Drupal with xx modules, expected visitors, if media-streaming is important, if you expect them to manage the server or not, if you need an SLA, how much downtime you are willing to accept and what else you deem important) and ask them to offer you what they think is a reasonable environment for that. Throw away the cheapest and the most expensive offers, check if you can find any reviews about the remaining companies and select one.

Make sure you can get out of the contract in a month, so that if you are not satisfied you can easily switch to another hoster.

At the end it's all about knowing

what you need,
that you get what you pay for.