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Website & Web Hosting Speed Test

All web hosts claim they are fast, but what does that mean? And how can a web host provide the quickest loading websites?

Web Hosting Technology

To have a fast loading website you need a combination of a couple of things:

Hardware: You need the latest and greatest in terms of hardware. Most importantly, for ultimate speed you need to be running enterprise-level SSD drives in a RAID-10 configuration. That’s something we do on all of our servers. The ensures that the data loading from the server hard drives loads without any delay. Traditional non-SSD hard drives can make websites load up to a second slower, which makes all the difference in today’s fast-loading world. Additionally, you need to be running the latest processors (the more core’s the better) and adequate amounts of ram. With enough ram, MySQL temp tables can be put completely into memory, increasing the speed of MySQL queries.

Software: Now all operating systems and http frameworks are made equal. We run a custom built Linux OS, with a custom optimized version of Apache bundled with FCGI for faster page loads, faster php executions and faster overall websites.

Optimizations: You can’t optimized a server to be the fastest at multiple platforms. For this reason, we custom build and optimized each server for each specific CMS. For example, Magento servers run a custom flavor of MySQL and are specifically built from the ground up to be optimized for Magento level queries.

Network: You can have the best hardware, most optimized server, and the best support – but if you’re hosted on a second-tier network, your sites will load slow. Our data center uses only tier-1 upstream bandwidth providers to make sure your site loads fast from everywhere in the world.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

So how do we compare? We pitted ourselves against the biggest web hosts in the world – specifically those that claim to offer the fastest hosting. In the end, the numbers speak for themselves:

#1. T35 Hosting 0.7s, 97/100, faster than 95% of all tested websites
t35hosting

#2. RackSpace 2.64, 75/100, faster than 60% of all tested websites
rackspace

#3. HostGator 2.97s, 62/100, faster than 55% of all tested websites
hostgator

#4. BlueHost, 3.06s, 74/100, faster than 54% of all tested websites
bluehost

#5. MediaTemple 3.37s, 73/100, faster than 49% of all tested websites
mediatemple


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