Intellivative Payment Solutions without Borders

We’ve noticed that pages on our web site have been loading rather slowly, and it’s been a point of contention at Intellivative on why our site is running sooooo sloooow. So we decided to do a test to determine whether the slowness was caused by the site design or the hosting company. We discovered that the load time varies a LOT depending on the hosting company. We are in the process now of determining which host we’re going to go with, but we thought the results of our comparison tests might be useful to some of you who are trying to decide on a hosting company for your own web sites.

To all of you who have experienced slow load times on our web site, we apologize. We are working to move to a faster hosting company as quickly as possible. Also, although we currently hire a hosting company for our web sites, we do our own hosting for our transaction processing and carefully monitor performance to ensure a high service level. We are considering doing the same for the company web site, but for a little while anyway, we’ll still be using a shared hosting company.

A side by side comparison of web site hosting companies

So how do you go about comparing web hosting companies? It’s hard to distinguish between them by looking at their web sites–they all promise so much. How do you know if one host will be faster or slower than this other one? Reading reviews is helpful, but for us it wasn’t enough. We’d already read a lot of reviews and selected our current host based on someone’s recommendations, and look where THAT got us.

The need for speed

For us, web page load time across the entire site was really important. Also, we use Wordpress for intellivative.com, so of course the site had to support Wordpress, MySQL, and PHP. We’re also concerned about uptime and support, but really, speed is so critical. On the web if your site doesn’t respond within a few seconds, your visitors very likely have lost patience and moved onto somewhere else. Our test focused on page load time. How do you know how quickly your pages will load on any host? The only way we know of was to test it by hosting the same design and content on several different hosts and measuring page load time.

Test #1: Bluehost vs. SimpleHelix and FatCow

The test:

• We loaded our Intellivative Wordpress theme and imported the site content on all three hosts.
• Using the Full Page Test at http://tools.pingdom.com/, we tested the page load time for 7 different pages with three trials on each page.
• We did two runs of the same test: one on Monday, July 13 from 10:30 – 11:30 and then again the same day from 11:30 – 12:00

The results:

• Of these three hosting companies, SimpleHelix was hands down the fastest, but Bluehost performed well, too.
• The graph shows the percentage of pages that loaded in less than X seconds, so the higher the bar at the earlier times (2 sec, 3 sec), the faster the host is serving pages.
  • SimpleHelix was the only hosting company that loaded any pages in less than 2 seconds, and it loaded over 50% of the pages in less than 3 seconds. Almost 80% of the pages were loaded in less than 5 seconds.
  • Bluehost loaded only a small number of pages in less than 3 seconds, but it did load over 50% of the pages in less than 4 seconds, and almost 80% of the pages in less than 5 seconds.
  • FatCow is very slow serving this particular web site–loading only 30% of the pages in less than 9 seconds. Nine seconds is a long time to wait for a page to load on the web–and FatCow’s average page load time was almost 10 seconds.

Test #2: GoDaddy, JustHost, WestHost, and FatCow

My boss wanted us to look at some other hosts that he’d heard are good, so we did a second test with three other hosting companies. Unfortunately, we couldn’t include Bluehost and Simplehelix in this test because we’d already taken down the sites, so this test compared GoDaddy, JustHost, WestHost, and FatCow. The test:

• First, we had to sign up for a hosting account with each of these hosts.
• Again, we loaded our Intellivative Wordpress theme and imported the site content on all three hosts.
• Using the Full Page Test at http://tools.pingdom.com/, we tested the page load time for 10 different pages with three trials on each page.
• We did two runs of the same test: one on Monday, July 20 from 10:00 – 11:00 and then again the same day from 11:45 – 12:45 central standard time.

The results:

• GoDaddy and JustHost were both pretty fast, but JustHost performed a little better.
• Note that JustHost loaded over 70% of the pages in less than 3 seconds, and over 90% in less than 6 seconds.
• GoDaddy loaded 30% of the pages in less than 3 seconds, and almost 90% in less than 6 seconds.
• WestHost didn’t do so well on this test–only 30% of the pages were loaded in less than 6 seconds, but they did load over 70% of the pages in less than 9 seconds.
• FatCow did not fare well in this test either, which is consistent with the results we saw in the earlier test. They only managed to serve 40% of the pages in less than 9 seconds–the rest were loaded slower than that.

Your results may vary

If we ran these tests again on another day, we would get different numbers. The numbers here aren’t absolute—a lot of factors come into play when you’re talking about the speed of web pages. The same hosting companies might fare differently with a different site—or on a different day. Hosting companies generally have several servers and some servers may perform better than others for specific technologies.  The time of day and the day of the week that the tests are done also makes a difference because there’s more traffic on the servers at certain times of the day/week.
We did these tests to compare Wordpress hosting companies for our web site—we’re using it to give us a general idea of how quickly OUR web site might run on each of these hosts. We purposely chose a variety of pages on our site and included the main blog page (which shows several posts) as well as a category, a blog post, and several other pages on the site.
If your web site uses different technology or content management—or even if you’re running a Wordpress site, your site will probably experience different results. FatCow and WestHost might perform very well on some other web sites–we don’t know. But we discovered (a little belatedly) that those two hosting companies probably aren’t the best choices for our Intellivative web site.
If you’re looking for a hosting company, you may want to run your own test rather than using our results. If you do a comparison test, why don’t you drop us a line and let us know how your testing turned out? We’d love to hear it.