Anyway to test speed of a website?

[Indiana627]

Our company site is hosted in California but I'm in New York. Lately I've noticed our site can sometimes take a while to load even though it's not a complex site compared to some out there. Is there way to test the speed of the site somehow so I can complain to the hosting company with some ammunition? Usually the other sites I go to load fast, so I don't think the issue is on my end. Thanks.

[funhouse69]

There are many services out there that monitor the performance of a website. When it comes to free tools the only one I've ever found is this one

http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.website-test.html

The other thing you can do is a visual trace or a simple trace route from the PC you say is seems slow on. This will go through all of the networks / Hops that you go through to access the website. The more Hops the more potential for delay.

Unfortunately the problem might not have anything to do with your hosting company it could be with your ISP that your accessing it from. The way the internet works is through peering agreements with other ISPs. Basically they agree to allow each others traffic to pass through. It's possible that something has change in the path that your ISP Takes you there which is not uncommon.

At the same time Hosting Providers can also be part of these Peering Agreements through the ISP's that they use to get the content "Closer" to their customers. Unfortunately a lot of the lower cost companies do not have a lot of these in place as it does cost money.

Hope this helps start you in the right direction.

[Jeff McClellan]

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

[HIPAR]

I would think there are lots of factors that determine the apparent speed of a website. Websites that aren't hosted on a sever connected to the net through a 'big pipe' will most likely respond slowly even if the internet isn't congested. Perhaps if you can time a download of a multi-megabyte file from the site, you can gauge its speed buy comparing the time to known to be efficient websites.



--- CHAS