So, you have a web host and a webpage. You’re data is stored on a secure and reliable server with little downtime. What more could you want? Well, reliability isn’t the only thing that matters; you also have to consider a hosting speed test as a measure of the quality of your service.
Truthfully, there isn’t any one hosting speed test or test method that is going to tell you how all surfers will experience your site. You can conduct such a test by allowing users to report their experience of load times or by the load times of your page from different locations, but the speed at which a given page loads for a given user is subject to all kinds of variables, many of which are beyond your control or that of your hosting service. There are some people, believe it or not, that still use dialup connections and many people are plagued with shoddy infrastructure or ISPs that provide slow or unstable connections to the Internet. People subject to these circumstances will experience slow load times across the board and probably won’t notice a difference from site to site. There are, however, things to take into consideration in order to maximize the number of people that will have a positive experience when accessing your site.
The Internet can correctly be described as a vast web of connections that spread over the world. We tend to think of it as an abstract space, but it does loosely conform to real-world geography and the physical position of your site (or the servers that host your site) does actually matter. If you, in New York City lets say, are accessing a site that is hosted on a server physically located in Australia, there is simply no way you will have a direct link. Any information you want from the site will have to be requested by you, relayed from server to server, hub to hub, until it finally reaches the server hosting the site, then the data will have to be transmitted back through the network, being relayed from node to node along they way. Every time a packet of information reaches a node, it must be processed and routed to the next server in the chain. The more nodes in the chain, the longer the inevitable lag and the more possibilities there are for packets of information to be delayed in processing bottlenecks or even lost (requiring them to be re-sent), slowing down the effective rate of transfer even further.
Proximity to the location of your audience can actually make a difference, but generally speaking this won’t be biggest issue given how quickly most servers communicate. What is important is that you start getting a sense of the Internet’s landscape, so to speak, because it will help you understand the other factors that will determine the speed at which your site loads for surfers. The traffic encountered by servers along the transmission chain and the load on servers, especially on the one hosting your webpage, will effect speed.
The most important factor you can control is the ability of your host server to handle traffic. If you’re running a small site that doesn’t generate much traffic, there will be no quality loss if you choose a cheaper solution like shared web hosting, where multiple sites may be run off a single server. In such cases, however, the speed of your site’s loading times may be bogged down because the server is taxed by traffic going to the other sites it is hosting simultaneously. Some hosts do a better job than others of managing traffic on their servers, but the larger your site the more bandwidth you’ll need to occupy to maintain performance and avoid the timeouts and loading errors that result when a server is taxed beyond its tolerance.
Larger sites will need dedicated servers, but even this may not be enough. High-volume sites, or sites with international audiences, may need to consider distributed hosting solutions so that the traffic load can be balanced across multiple physical servers in order to avoid bottlenecks, lag, lost packets and timeouts, which would all produce a negative effect on the experience surfers have of a given site.
The performance of your site in a hosting speed test will hinge on matching the kind of hosting service you use with the amount and type of traffic you are drawing. The more servers you have, the better they are maintained and the more traffic they can handle, the more certain you will be of speed and quality, but you have to balance between your needs and your budget in order to be cost effective.
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This is good test. In my experience I met a lot of troubles with all servers I had used and until I start my own server I will not find the good hosting plan I think.