What's speed worth?

[royalelephant]

I've been using a Net Monitor off and on for awhile to check on response times, especially when my sites seems s-l-o-w. It got me wondering what was the effect of the server's up-time, response time, etc., to page views, SE rankings. Is there any rule of thumb about this.

Is there a way to compare hosting company's servers before making a switch? Should I pay more for the same bandwidth and disk space if there's some evidence that the response time is quicker? Does speed pay?

[Smiley]

If your site seems s-l-o-w to you then the chances are your visitors are thinking the same. So your page views may be suffering.

Also the SE’s will find it slow. So they may not be taking as much of your site as they could be. And when your server is down they will take nothing, so no pages in the index. So your listings could be suffering.

>Is there a way to compare hosting company's servers before making a switch?

There is in the UK, if you are after UK hosting take a look at:
[webperf.net...]

>Should I pay more for the same bandwidth and disk space if there's some evidence that the response time is quicker

Yes.

>Does speed pay?

Everytime. Speed is still *so* important, despite the number of broadband connections.

But hold on, before changing servers ask yourself why is your site slow. Is it because of large file sizes, complex server processing or because your hosts server is slow?

Smiley

[Ivana]

I went to have a look, and the respond time was actually quite slow on webperf.net!

[royalelephant]

Hmm.. is there a good online test for host providers in the USA?

[BwanaZulia]

Speed is everything.

Think about it. If a user has 10 minutes to surf your site and you double the speed of you pages (less html/graphics/gzip, etc) That user will surf over twice as many pages.

If you are selling something, that is twice as many oppurtunities to sell.

I have spent months now tweaking code to get down to a very tight HTML and fast site(s).

BZ