Cheap Web Hosts: Speed Tests

[Mac In School]

As most of you already know, I'm doing some independent testing of the big-4 cheap Web hosts that most people seem to ask about:

• 1&1
• A Small Orange
• Dreamhost
• Host Gator

These are the 4 big cheap hosts that most people seem to ask about. Not just on this forum, but on many, many forums. Since I'm fortunate enough to have experience (and current accounts) with all of them, I figured I'd do this to help people see how they stack up against each other.

My first test, based solely on speed, are complete. You can read about them here:

Cheap Web Hosting Speed Tests.

I'm still about 3 weeks out from completing my reliability and responsiveness tests. I want to be sure I have a full month worth of data for the report.

I hope somebody out there finds this helpful. Enjoy!

 

[ChicoWeb]

Very nice article.

I would be most curious to see who has the best uptime, because THAT is the most important business question.

 

[Mac In School]

I am testing that, by using an independent 3rd party service to monitor all 4 hosts. Three weeks to results.

 

[cwright]

Interesting. Earlier I did some searching for web hosting services and came across a nice comparison of 10 top services (according to that site, I guess). So you just gave me 4 others to look into.

I mentioned this in my other thread, but you might know this: should I expect a substantial increase in speed (mainly just worried about the site loading) when moving my site from a .Mac server to one of these dedicated hosting solutions? I'm hearing from several people that Apple's servers are a bit slow...

 

[Mac In School]

I don't know, and I don't really want to come across as an authority on the subject. I'm just a dude that happened to have a hosting account with each, that saw a question that needed to be answered.

With that said...

I would have to think that going from .Mac to dedicated hosting would be a huge jump. Quite frankly, going from .Mac to descent shared hosting may be a big jump... I'm not sure. I haven't done much with .Mac. Just created a few of the new photo galleries. They definitely load very slowly, but how much of that is because of servers and how much is the content? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Javascript file alone, diving the photo galleries, was well over 1 MB!

Also, if you want to use iWeb on a non-.Mac host, be sure you find out what iWeb features will and will not work on a "regular" host.

As far as "best host" lists go, I personally ignore them. This discussion doesn't necessarily confirm my feelings about them, but it does mirror what I've always guessed.

This host evaluation site seems like a much better resource to me. Taking the time to read the entire front page could end up saving you a lot of headaches down the road.