At EPhost Web Hosting, we have clients in 22 different countries who use our service regularly. However, we understand that every situation is different and that there are many factors that affect overall performance. Here is some information to help.
The route from one location to another on the internet is different and is always changing. There are many computers (routers) between you and your website that your request may travel through. Thus the route from one location to one web host will be different than that same location but a different web host. Likewise, the route from your location to another may also be different depending on the particular ISP you use. Some routes could be slower or faster or even completely change at certain times of the day or when work is being performed by your ISP, its uplink or us and our uplinks.
To determine the speed between two locations on the internet we would measure the latency. Latency is the time it takes for a request to be received at one location from another. Depending on the route your latency may degrade or improve accordingly. Usually this can be measured by a PING request. However, PING requests are usually given the lowest priority on a router so they are not always accurate.
It's important to keep in mind that not all users will experience the same level of performance. For instance, if your route to our servers is slow, it doesn't mean that it is not lightning fast to others. It all boils down to the route.
To help diagnose these types of connectivity issues you could send us yourtrace route and ping data for us to evaluate. Sometimes we can spot and helpresolve potential issues.
- Run "tracert www.ephost.com" from a command line and send us the output.
- Run "ping www.ephost.com" from a command line and send us the output.*
* To get accurate results you'll need to send us morning, noon and nightPING stats.
Lastly, other factors may affect overall performance and the appearance ofpoor connectivity. This includes server usage, available server resources andbandwidth usage. This is especially true for shared hosting accounts but alsoapplies to dedicated servers. We work hard to keep our server to customer ratiolow for the best performance in shared hosting. However, if a server is doingits daily backup, for instance, you may experience some intermittent slownessduring that time frame if you are running a heavy request (e.g. a script with alot of queries or trying to do a large FTP upload). Also consider that web pagerequests to internal or external resources may also affect page load times andthus the appearence of poor connectivity. For instance, if your script makes acall to our shared MS SQL server or make a call to Google Analytics the pageload time would be affected by the availablity of those resources as well.
