You may want to test the speed of a prospective host before you buy a hosting package from them. "Speed" in this sense refers to the rate at which data can be transferred between a site visitor and the host’s server. There are several ways to test the speed of a server.

The first and simplest is to ping the server. Basically, the ping command, which can be run in an MS DOS prompt, sends a series of packets of information to a site, and measures how long it takes for the site to respond and send the packets back. The command is "ping serverID" (so type c:\>ping www.mywebsite.com). You can also ping an IP address. You will get a series of results which begins "Reply from [IP address] and then the size of each packet in bytes and the time it took for the packet to get there and back. As a rule of thumb, a ping time of under 200 milliseconds is a good ping time; between 200ms and 400ms is average; and more than 400ms is poor. The number of packets "lost" will also be listed; this is how many packets failed to come back in less than one second. Obviously, lost packets are a bad thing.

The second way to measure speed is using the trace route command, which is tracert serverID (i.e. c:\>tracert www.mywebsite.com). The result should be a list of "hops", which is the routers that the packet visited on the way to the IP address that you performed the command on. There will also be a time listed for the round trip to each of these routers. This can be useful for working out where the problem is if a host seems rather slow. Short times are a good sign, as is a small number of hops. You can run trace routes from other computers located in other parts of the world at sites like www.traceroute.org.

Trace route is not the last word in speed evaluation, however; the most efficient way of testing a host is to do a download speed test. You can ask your host for a test download file if you wish; however, the host may try to mislead you by uploading the test file to a nearly empty server, which will make download time faster. A better idea might be to ask one of the host’s clients to give you the URL of a test file. The file should be about 10-15MB so that you can monitor the average download speed over time. Also, make sure you download the file at the busiest possible time, to really test your host.

Users of a forum like WebHostingTalk will often be happy to download test files for you to test the speed in different parts of the world, or test for you if you only have a dialup connection.

Author: Natalie Catchpole

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