How we Measure Web Hosts Speeds

Here is the lowdown on how we measure web hosts speeds:

We Crawl the Web Looking for Hosts

Contrary to other host-speed measurement web sites who only monitor the web hosting companies that sign up for their monitoring service, Hosting4Speed has the potential of monitoring all of the world's hosting companies.

We Measure Sites Hosted, Not Hosts

Our Hosting4Speed crawler scours the web looking for hosted sites and then detects who hosts them. Why? If we measured hosting company's own home pages, it would be easy for them to manipulate our results by putting their own home page on a super nice server while dumping all the customers on sluggish servers. By measuring sites hosted instead of the host's own page, we make sure our results spopt only the web hosting companies that seem to store their customers web pages on efficient servers. Once we found a hosted site, we look for a graphic file of a size similar to those we found at other web sites and our testing script frequently downloads this file and gathers data about the download process.

We Focus on Request Connections, Not Transfer Time

Contrary to popular belief, it is not so much the transfer time between your computer and a web site that slows things down, it's much more the time required to establish the connection for each element of a web page. For instance, when downloading a 1KB file, most of the time is not spent transfering the actual 1000 bytes, most of the time is spent "getting ready" to transfer them. Since most web sites require your browser to download many elements to display a page, the connection time for each element adds up and can mean a lot. Therefore, we measure the connection time and that's why you will see "Average connection time" here and there on Hosting4Speed.

We Never Measure a Host From Its Own Country

If we measured a hosting company located in the same city as one of our test location, it would appear artificially much faster. By always measuring from outside the country, we reduce that risk to a minimum. One could argue that, when measuring from a nearby country, some closer hosts could still appear artificially faster but our tests showed that, most of the time, the fastest hosts are distributed equally within a country's territory. In other words, distance is a factor in speed, but it's far from being the only factor or even the most important one. Other factors such as server load and the way a host's datacenter interconnects with other ISPs also contribute a lot to their speed.

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