A Host for Your Site: Look at the Hard Numbers
February 15th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 9 Comments
If you oversee any type of site on the web—whether it’s a blog or a busy e-commerce hub—performance and support are probably both things that you’d like to optimize. Many of the tech publications occasionally run performance tests on the top hosting services, but they’re done on a sporadic basis, and the results are only snapshots of moving targets. RealMetrics is a good site to know about if you want much richer, more persistently captured data, and you can get it for free or for a very nominal fee. If you do some looking, you’ll find that some of the smaller, less expensive hosts have far better RealMetrics ratings than the name-brand hosts.
Unlike the occasional comparisons of the site hosting services done in tech publications, RealMetrics does rolling tests of site performance, response times from support personnel and more throughout the week. In evaluating Peak Uptime for hosting services, RealMetrics’ monitoring stations check every 30 seconds during the busiest times of the day (Monday through Friday) whether a simple web page can be loaded.
In addition to Peak Uptime, RealMetrics measures Uptime, results for which are compiled from huge sets of attempts to load a web page going on during peak hours and during lighter load hours. Results are displayed as colored blocks along a thermometer, where a higher score is better.
RealMetrics’ Web Speed Index calculations are worth taking a close look at, and there is wide variance in the results from various hosts. These calculations are run every 30 minutes to see how fast a simple web page loads, and then the results are aggregated for each host. As is true for all of RealMetrics’ tables, hover your mouse over a table’s title to see what the results are based on.
As you might expect, the busiest, name-brand hosting services do not earn the highest ratings from RealMetrics. For example, currently Dot5Hosting does a far better job of serving up web pages during peak uptimes than GoDaddy’s economy plan does. Ever heard of Steadfast Networks? Me either. But RealMetrics’ Web Speed Index score for this hosting service is nearly perfect, and its score for response time from support personnel is perfect. The fee for its basic hosting plan is under $5 a month—among the cheapest plans available.
It’s worth taking a look at these tests yourself. Note that if you don’t see a host you’re interested in among the free results, RealMetrics has a link at the bottom of the page for getting access to all hosts. This costs $9, but might be well worth it to you.
Which hosting service do you use, and would you recommend it? If so, why?
9 Comments Post your own comment
Amie Gillingham says: February 15th, 2008 5:56pm
I may be one of those shelling out the $9 to compare hosts since neither our current dedicated server host nor the competitor to whom we’re considering switching is listed.
Thanks for the timely tip!
Aaron Bailey says: February 15th, 2008 7:23pm
The problem with these basic benchmarks is that they don’t account for various types of applications you might want to run on your site. The tests above are just accounting for a simple HTML page. Shared hosts should quickly serve basic HTML pages without batting an eye. The real question is if the host will serve up your application (blogs, wiki, shopping cart, etc.) without problem.
You’ll want to do research or talk to someone knowledgeable about whether what you need to do with your site fits well with where you want to host it.
My experience with a dozen or so hosts over a few years is that the better the support, the better the host. Also, make sure you have contingencies in place for when your host goes dark (and it will!).
Samuel says: February 15th, 2008 7:56pm
Very good points, Aaron. There are lots of metrics for evaluating which host is right for your site. Some of them offer very good professional help at reasonable prices for tasks such as design, some of them just have stellar support, etc. However, if you look at the RealMetrics data you can clearly see large variances in how the various hosts do even simple things like serving a simple page up at peak hours or in a reasonable amount of time.
LG says: February 16th, 2008 1:14am
pfftt.
If anyone seriously thinks IXWebhosting achieve 99% uptime, I have a bridge I’d like to sell them.
My experience was that most of their boxes are down for about an hour a day, every day.
My current host (Nearlyfreespeech.net — with a pay for use biz model that predates Amazon EC2/S3 by about 10 years) don’t appear to be on the list. I’d rate their uptime as excellent, and their speed (for complex PHP stuff) as fair.
Whilst I’d be glad for a bit of objectivity, it seems that Netmetrics still rely mostly on hosting providers for their income. I’d be wary of placing too much stock in them.
Rob W says: February 16th, 2008 5:29am
A hugely important point: their uptime “stats” include only 7am to 7pm CST, Monday – Friday.
So a host with 100% uptime might actually be completely inaccessible for 108 hours of each 168-hour week.
That’s insane. How is that a useful metric? I guess it’s helpful for people hosting sites that are only EVER accessed by people in the US, during working hours… who does that include, exactly? Don’t some people do their online shopping at home in the evenings, or on weekends, perhaps?
Another huge point: they set up an account with these hosts, then check it every 30 seconds, but only 7am – 7pm M-F. And I’ll bet these sites get no other traffic. So for the host to track down the test account and put it in their most stable environment is a no-brainer….
So no, I wouldn’t recommend paying for this.
Rob W says: February 16th, 2008 5:45am
…wait a second. I’m reading the description for “Peak Uptime”. That’s the reason for the time limitation.
Sorry, I should have realized that. :(
So, that’s better, though it still seems like it would be easy for a host to “manage” that test account.
About income: they collect from people who want to see the whole list, and they collect from hosts who want to be on the public list. It makes sense as a business model, since the public listing is a fixed price thing, not related to level of coverage, any kind of opinion-related review, etc..
russ says: February 16th, 2008 1:07pm
i would love to see more comments on actually hosting companies, and your experience with them. i use godaddy and ixwebhosting for most projects, and godaddy seems to have excellent uptime, while ixwebhosting is iffy sometimes, maybe 10% it’s down. any other hosts that you recommend?
magnus says: February 17th, 2008 6:52am
Another great service to use if you are interested in monitoring your webservices is Pingdom (http://www.pingdom.com/).
Works brilliantly!
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