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  • Fast Web Hosting – Quenching Your Website’s Thirst for Speed

    Updated 05/12/09 by Musa Aykac • Filed under: Web Hosting

    Fast Web Hosting – Quenching Your Website’s Thirst for Speed

    Web Hosting – http://www.pixelinternet.co.uk

    More and more visitors to the internet demand speed. There are so many sites out there that they just don’t have the time to wait for a slow site to load. Your site will be compared to your competitors’ by its content of course, but increasing it will also be judged by its speed. No one wants to sit and wait, especially if there is an alternative provider that’s faster. If you already have a website, this is very likely to be already clear to you. So what do you do?

    It used to be that the slowest part of the entire connection chain was your customers’ internet speed and sometimes their computers’ processing speed. This is not universally true any longer, and is becoming even less so all the time. This is due to the ever increasing computer speeds, and the rapid increase means higher and higher connection speed options available to the consumer nowadays. Therefore, the speed of your site, meaning mostly the speed of your web host provider, is going to play a more important role.

    Ok, but how fast is fast? First, look at your site. Is it text heavy or is it graphics heavy? To load quickly, pictures take many times over more bandwidth than does text.

    If you know you need speed, look for a web host company that offers so called “un-metered” transfers rather than “unlimited bandwidth.” Generally speaking, web hosts can’t really live up to promises of unlimited bandwidth unless they are small and just starting up. As their customer base (that’s you and those like you) gets larger the expense of providing true unlimited bandwidth is cost prohibitive. Nonetheless, you do see these promises. So how do they do it? They restrict the number of data bytes that your site is able to load per second. This effectively controls bandwidth use by reducing your sites overall speed in real time. They claim unlimited bandwidth but restrict your ability to access it. Instead, if you need speed, look for a web host that likely does restrict your total bandwidth availability but not your actual transfer rate.

    Also, be aware that other websites on the same web host server can affect your speed and throughput. If the server you are on is full of websites that seem very intense in traffic terms, such as continuous large file download sites, and the web host’s equipment used isn’t up to the task, it will slow all websites on the server.

    If your website needs speed and has heavy traffic, you had better be prepared to spend a lot more for it. Bandwidth and data transfer rates are functions of cost. If your competition has squeezed you into a speed corner and the only way to compete is to acquire more space and speed, then you will need to be sure of the success it will bring so you can afford the additional cost.

    The ultimate move is to pay for a dedicated server of the latest type available. This is where you don’t share the server with any other websites. Your bandwidth and throughput speed is then determined by the equipment you are on, not the usage of others.

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