This a question I've thought about for quite some time. Obviously the one critical aspect that everyone pays attention to the most in their host is uptime, probably followed by the level of customer support. However, comparing one host to another can be difficult.

Is there any good way to compare one host to another in areas such as speed or efficiency in serving your pages?

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The best way to really benchmark a web hosting provider would be to simply contact them with the needs of your website/business and ask if they are able to meet those needs.

Off the top of my head, there isn't a benchmarking standard or test you can really perform outside of your normal ping's and trace routes to check the MS response rates.

Of course, you can always contact them and ask them what solutions they implement to ensure speedy delivery of content, however, simply because they employ such a method doesn't mean that it's effective.

Larger web hosting providers tend to overload their servers, not all, but most do. The good news, it's easier to tell who does judging by their offers.

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There isn't exactly a simple way to test, but...
-Ask for a 10/50/100mb test file and see if it downloads slower than any other usual download from the net.
-Ping the server and see how long it takes to respond [relative to other servers in the country it is in]
-Ask the host for a few of the URLs it hosts and see how the sites perform.

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I sometimes email the host as well, just to see how long it takes for them to reply, or indeed if they do actually reply. Just to get a general idea of customer support.

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While doing a speed test with a larger file in excess of 10MB's is a good way to get a general indication of speed, it can also provide false readings due to network congestion and various other situations.

If you're going to use a file for a speed test, test it multiple times over a 24 hour period of time and at various times of day/night.

Too many people are quick to judge speed by a single test when network congestion and your ISP may be to blame. I can easily attest to being one of those people myself, so I now run multiple tests to get my speed data. I also ask others in other countries to run their own tests. The reason? I am closer to any US data center than say, someone in Germany , so of course my speed and PING's are going to be better.


That aside, any host with common sense would be willing to provide you with websites they host so that you can get a general idea of speed on a live website.

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Benchmarking a host isn’t all that feasible, especially in the shared environment. Since you would get different level of performance depending on the time and day other sites on that server are most busy.

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Find some site hosted on that hosting on server where your site will be and use HostTracker [Website Uptime Monitoring Service]

Nikola