From time to time I am asked the question, ”How long does it take visitors from another country to load my website?”. This is a very important question if you are hosting your website on servers in one geographic location but are receiving visitors from another geographic location. Since the Internet is global in scope, it is very likely that some of your website visitors are experiencing delays (latency) in reaching your web content. The good news is that there is a great free tool online to quantify the load times of your website around the world.
The online tool that I recommend to view latency is at www.alertra.com. The service works as follows (from the Alertra website), ”Multi-POP (point of presence) monitoring stations, located around the world in carrier-class data centers, conduct rigorous RFC-compliant protocol tests on your Web servers, network services and hardware devices like routers, etc. In addition to sending alerts and recording uptime statistics, we’re also capturing important performance data including connect time, time to first byte and overall load time. All availability and performance data is viewable online in report and chart format and is also downloadable in popular formats including Excel and XML.”
So how exactly is this tool used, and what is it good for? Let’s pose a hypothetical example. Let’s say that you want to host content that will be viewed mostly by visitors in the United States and Europe. Which hosting company will provide a fast connection to both? How can we empirically compare the various hosting companies on load times?
Let’s use for our example 4 hosting company candidates – two in the United States and two in Europe. Our candidates from the United States are Super Bowl advertiser, GoDaddy.com, U.S. industry behemoth Hostway.com, UK hosting company 34SP.com, and German webhost 123-web-host.de.
If you go to Alertra.com there is a box in the upper right hand corner labeled ‘Spot Check’ with the instructions ‘Enter URL’ next to it. Simply type in the full URL of the website you would like to check and hit the ‘check’ button. The results will be displayed in a few seconds with a variety of cities listed and also the length of time in seconds that the site takes to load. Below is a list with the results from our 4 companies using Atlanta, U.S.A. and London, England as the reference points.
Website Hosting Latency:
GoDaddy.com
Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time – 0.44
London, England Load Time - 1.39
Hostway.com
Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time – 0.22
London, England Load Time - 1.41
34SP.com
Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 1.24
London, England Load Time - 0.35
123-web-host.de
Atlanta, U.S.A Load Time - 0.84
London, England Load Time - 0.64
As you would expect, the U.S. based companies are fastest to Atlanta and the European hosts are fastest to the U.K. While there are subtle differences here, all the sites loaded in less than 1.5 seconds – even in a worst case scenario. That means that any of them would probably be fast enough for a business website in either location. As with any web hosting company decision, this is just one factor that goes into selecting a great web host.
One other note – you can read various articles on the Alertra website including ‘Web Host Strategies for Server Monitoring‘. Alertra is a great free resource which also has a paid monitoring component. I hope this information is helpful to you in determining website latency.
This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for The WHIR.
