Testing hosting speed

[Brighton Sarah]

Hi there,

I'm in quite a new job as a webmaster and our site is hosted externally and seems rather slow to me. Not all the time, but too much to be acceptable, I think. CMS updates, for example, are frequently painfully slow and can even get timed out. This has been an ongoing problem apparently but unfortunately I don't have much to compare it against.

Can anyone advise how I can run some tests to look at speed etc and then determine whether these are slow, OKish, normal etc. I've started to researh Pings and DNS Lookup but am already getting a bit bogged down and would appreciate any helpful tips!

Cheers in advance...

[txbakers]

Hi. Alot of the speed will also depend on your connection to the internet.

Your server/host will have a solid connection, but your end might be slow and will skew any kind of results.

Unless you can login to the server itself and run some tests, you will be testing your internet connection rather than your hosts.

[celgins]

Txbakers is right.... but you could try checking ping stats and using trace route to look at the hops between the server and your machine.

For example at a COMMAND prompt,

C:\>tracert www.myslowhost.com

BTW, Brighton_Sarah .... did you say, "OKish"? :)

[rebelde]

Even better than traceroute is PingPlotter for testing round-trip time and casually monitoring site availability.

[Brighton Sarah]

OK, thanks guys - that helps.

I did say OKish, yes, but most of the time it's just slow. This is the case regardless of where you access it from though, so I'm pretty sure it's not the Internet connection.