Hosting Provider Comparison

There are many tools available for testing ping returns from a fixed location to a specified domain. But this is of little relevance when assessing the ability of a web hosting provider to reliably and consistently serve your web site to a nationwide or global audience.

It is unlikely that visitors will be accessing your web site from the same location, or utilizing the same connectivity as the test server. It is also unlikely that the individual server being pinged would actually host your web site, should you choose your hosting provider based upon such results.

An accurate test would include multiple pings from different geographic locations. The pings would be random and the querying servers would be on different networks with separate connectivity. Tests would be performed across a range of IP addresses on the web hosting provider's subnet, and this would be done over an extended period. To avoid anomalies, the highest and lowest figures should be discarded, and remaining results would be averaged.

The following chart, organized alphabetically, provides ping returns for the 50 most popular web hosting providers. Results are calculated by pinging random IP addresses from each provider's subnet 10 times at 10 random intervals throughout each 24-hour period. The test is performed from multiple servers in different geographic locations across North America, South America, Asia and Europe. Results are then averaged over 7 days.

- Lower millisecond figures (shorter bars) represent faster response times.
- FastVirtual is required to honor requests to be removed from this comparison.

Source: NetMechanic