By: Elisa P

Elisa P — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:30:09 +0000

That means nothing, where from your most users visit your website that is important, I heard bad things about lunarpages, I am hosting my website at http://aplis.net/ , you can also give them a try.

By: anatari

anatari — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:41:50 +0000

Ping is a measure of latency, or how long it takes for data to start flowing. Depending on your site, latency might be more important, or, just as often, bandwidth can be the constraining factor.
To understand low-bandwidth, low-latency communications, imagine having someone reading you your website over the phone. If you knew what you were looking for, you might be able to get the information very, very quickly, but if the person had to read through the entirety of every page, you can imagine it’d take a very, very long time to “surf”.
To understand high-bandwidth, high-latency communications, imagine that you sent every person who wanted to visit your website a DVD boxed set with the entire contents of your website, with, let’s say, 144 DVD’s. The box set might take a day to arrive, but when it did, 144 DVD’s is a lot of information, and when you work it out as how much information you’ve sent and the delay between its request and its arrival, you’re sending a DVD every ten minutes, or around 60 MBits/sec. That’s fantastic bandwidth, but the latency is terrible–if all the person visiting your site wanted was your recommendation on the best steak to get at the local steakhouse, they have to wait a full day to get it.
So, to sum:
If you’re trying to serve up a lot of multimedia content, you’re looking for a provider with very good bandwidth. Sadly, there aren’t consistent ways to test this without the hosting provider “playing along”, so you’re stuck trying to decipher their marketing materials.
If you’re just serving up a plain-ol’ website with the occasional graphic, low-latency will probably serve you best. Of course, a ping test doesn’t take into account webserver load, Akamaization, or any number of other variables. At the end of the day, once again, you’re stuck trying to decipher marketing materials.
So! Upshot is, grab a provider with good support, and if you get complaints, go to your provider’s support. If they are unable to help you, switch providers. If your business requires absolutely top-notch performance, start thinking of increasing your hosting budget by an order of magnitude or more, at which point you can start demanding SLA’s (Service-Level Agreements). Until then, you’re just one of the nameless mob, shoved into a slot in mass-administered commodity server farms.
Good luck!

Comments on: We Need A New Dedicated Server. Need Help Finding The Fastest One. Does A Ping Test Help?

By: Elisa P

By: anatari