Host ping times important ?

Ry@n · 22 Apr 2006 at 13:35

Hi all,

I understand that UK hosts are better than USA in respect of ping times, but how important is this ?

In your opinion, what is a "decent enough" ping time to a site you would view from the UK ?

Its just im worried that my host im using has rubbish ping times which affects loading times (am i right?)

Thanks

uk_viper · 22 Apr 2006 at 13:44

ping is just basically response times from a server, websites dont allways need a low ping, but it does help when you can load a page quicker, things like gameservers are when it comes a nessary to worry about pings

Beansprout · 22 Apr 2006 at 14:36

Server speed/health has a much bigger impact than ping really, unless it's a gaming server.

One issue is getting the maximum speed from file downloads but that can be solved through multiple connections with any decent download manager

A far more important factor is server load....some US-based hosts such as Hostgator are advertising insane amounts of bandwidth/disk space (like, 1Tb/20Gb) but their servers are heavily oversubscribed and overloaded...meaning that even if they're in the same room as you, they'd still be dog-slow :/

I'd stay away from dedicated servers / hosting in Asia though because the latency (ping time) there really is noticable and impacts performance rather a lot....ping times of 700ms+ aren't uncommon :eek:

Adz · 22 Apr 2006 at 17:32

It will affect loading times. 140ms doesn't sound like a lot but multiplied by the number of requests, it is. Latency also affects throughput. Also, the more 'hops' between the end user and server, the more likelihood of some kind of bottleneck along the way.

At the end of the day, it depends on the site, your user base and what kind of browsing experience you want/need to offer.

Beansprout · 22 Apr 2006 at 17:36

Adz said:
140ms doesn't sound like a lot but multiplied by the number of requests, it is.

Browsers make more than one concurrent connection that's not toooo much of an issue. It's one area that makes KeepAlive really worthwhile, though

Adz · 22 Apr 2006 at 17:39

Beansprout said:
Browsers make more than one concurrent connection that's not toooo much of an issue. It's one area that makes KeepAlive really worthwhile, though

It depends on the site, some sites might have 100+ objects

.

lookitsjonno · 22 Apr 2006 at 17:54

Adz said:
Also, the more 'hops' between the end user and server, the more likelihood of some kind of bottleneck along the way.

i think thats quite an important point. i remember a few years ago the transatlantic cable between the UK and US went down causing massive outages with US and other foreign hosted websites.

as Adz said, it all depends on what sort of sites you are going to be hosting. if they are sites where downtime will not cause too much trouble then fine, but if you need constant near guaranteed uptime then you need to look deeper into these things...

Ry@n · 23 Apr 2006 at 21:45

Thank you very much for the detailed replies

Another question id like to ask is, i have a script (oscommerce) installed on my host which adds a mysql databse aswell. If i was to decide to change hosts for a better more expensive one, is it simple to transfer mysql and files/scripts to the new host?

Ry

robmiller · 23 Apr 2006 at 21:58

Ry@n said:
Thank you very much for the detailed replies

Another question id like to ask is, i have a script (oscommerce) installed on my host which adds a mysql databse aswell. If i was to decide to change hosts for a better more expensive one, is it simple to transfer mysql and files/scripts to the new host?

Ry

Yep, use something like phpMyAdmin to produce a database dump, which you can then import on your new host.

killsta · 23 Apr 2006 at 22:19

Latency is also very noticable when you're FTPing loads of tiny files

Beansprout · 23 Apr 2006 at 22:22

Ry@n said:
Thank you very much for the detailed replies

Another question id like to ask is, i have a script (oscommerce) installed on my host which adds a mysql databse aswell. If i was to decide to change hosts for a better more expensive one, is it simple to transfer mysql and files/scripts to the new host?

Ry

Your existing host most likely gives you some form of control panel which may have the option to download a backup. Do this and, if your new host uses the same control panel, just upload it and ask them to restore it.

If your new host uses a different control panel then you should be able to open the backup on your PC, retrieve the files you want, and upload them