Comparing Website Speeds

Paying the correct amount for web site hosting is a question of balancing the price of the package to the speed of access to web pages. Many sites need a lot less bandwidth (the number of bytes transferred to or from the server) than that provided by the hosting plan. Only a few, very busy sites need more than 1Gb a month and it is not necessary to pay for more capacity than is actually used.

When checking for a suitable web host it is often the capacity of the connection to the Internet backbone that will determine the access time to web pages rather than the speed of the web host or the amount of bandwidth available.

To keep a check on the speed of access you need to compare your site against several other sites, hosted in different places. Site Vigil keeps comprehensive statistics for an unlimited number of web pages and measures a running average download speed for the web data. If your site is giving the same or better download speed than comparative sites then the choice of web host and hosting package is probably adequate.

Reducing the size of the text in the page, or more usually, the graphics referenced by the page can give dramatic improvements to the perceived access time to users. See Tip : Improving Page load time.

The access times measured by Site Vigil are divided up into the times to lookup the domain name, the time to make a socket connection to the web server and then the time to download the information.

Speed isn't everything, you need a reliable service too and that means that the web site is directly connected to the Internet by several routes so if one communication network fails then other routes are still available. Site Vigil keeps track of accessibility too.