A Host for Your Site: Look at the Hard Numbers

If you oversee any type of site on the web—whether it’s a blog or a busy e-commerce hub—performance and support are probably both things that you’d like to optimize. Many of the tech publications occasionally run performance tests on the top hosting services, but they’re done on a sporadic basis, and the results are only snapshots of moving targets. RealMetrics is a good site to know about if you want much richer, more persistently captured data, and you can get it for free or for a very nominal fee. If you do some looking, you’ll find that some of the smaller, less expensive hosts have far better RealMetrics ratings than the name-brand hosts.

Unlike the occasional comparisons of the site hosting services done in tech publications, RealMetrics does rolling tests of site performance, response times from support personnel and more throughout the week. In evaluating Peak Uptime for hosting services, RealMetrics’ monitoring stations check every 30 seconds during the busiest times of the day (Monday through Friday) whether a simple web page can be loaded.


In addition to Peak Uptime, RealMetrics measures Uptime, results for which are compiled from huge sets of attempts to load a web page going on during peak hours and during lighter load hours. Results are displayed as colored blocks along a thermometer, where a higher score is better.

RealMetrics’ Web Speed Index calculations are worth taking a close look at, and there is wide variance in the results from various hosts. These calculations are run every 30 minutes to see how fast a simple web page loads, and then the results are aggregated for each host. As is true for all of RealMetrics’ tables, hover your mouse over a table’s title to see what the results are based on.

As you might expect, the busiest, name-brand hosting services do not earn the highest ratings from RealMetrics. For example, currently Dot5Hosting does a far better job of serving up web pages during peak uptimes than GoDaddy’s economy plan does. Ever heard of Steadfast Networks? Me either. But RealMetrics’ Web Speed Index score for this hosting service is nearly perfect, and its score for response time from support personnel is perfect. The fee for its basic hosting plan is under $5 a month—among the cheapest plans available.

It’s worth taking a look at these tests yourself. Note that if you don’t see a host you’re interested in among the free results, RealMetrics has a link at the bottom of the page for getting access to all hosts. This costs $9, but might be well worth it to you.

Which hosting service do you use, and would you recommend it? If so, why?

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