Speed tests for Web pages and Web sites
Paying the correct amount for web site hosting is a question of balancing the price of the package to the speed of access to web pages. Many sites need a lot less bandwidth (the number of bytes transferred to or from the server) than that provided by the hosting plan. Only a few, very busy sites need more than 1Gb a month and it is not necessary to pay for more capacity than is actually used.
When checking for a suitable web host it is often the capacity of the connection to the Internet backbone that will determine the access time to web pages rather than the speed of the web host or the amount of bandwidth available.
To keep a check on the speed of access you need to compare your site against several other sites, hosted in different places. Site Vigil keeps comprehensive statistics for an unlimited number of web pages and measures a running average download speed for the web data. If your site is giving the same or better download speed than comparative sites then the choice of web host and hosting package is probably adequate.
Reducing the size of the text in the page, or more usually, the graphics referenced by the page can give dramatic improvements to the perceived access time to users. See Tip : Improving Page load time.
The access times measured by Site Vigil are divided up into the times to lookup the domain name, the time to make a socket connection to the web server and then the time to download the information.
site speed test
site speed test
Now that web hosting companies have become more competitive at seeking out new business, there is less differential in speed than there ever used to be.
It is often the case that the design of a web page will have a more dramatic effect on perceived speed than a slightly faster web host. Many sites use graphics that can be substantially reduced in file size, or redesigned so that they have smaller, simpler graphics. Speed is also a measure of the communication system, it will often be the case (especially without a broadband connection) that the slowest step is getting the data from the Internet to the client computer over a 56K modem line.
When you have set up a site for page access (URL) monitoring, Site Vigil builds up statistics and displays easy to understand graphs indicating when access times to the web page were fast or slow. It alerts you if the access time gets too long indicating that a page or graphic will be slow to load in a web browser.
The orange bars indicate when the time has exceeded the threshold for that particular page. The different colors reflect the different stages in accessing a page (looking up domain name, connecting to the server and downloading the page).
Site Vigil keeps a summary of the monitoring with all sorts of useful information available at any time, it has an access time distribution graph and details of speeds and access times.
high hosting site speed web
high hosting site speed web
Site Vigil™ is a sophisticated web site monitoring tool that lets you thoroughly check your site. Improve the effectiveness of your web site by tracking the flow of visitors. Make sure your site is operational and your web host is giving a fast, trouble-free service. Automatically check the position of your site on search engines and the validity of all the links.
It runs on an ordinary Windows® PC, using your normal Internet connection to gather data quietly in the background. Periodically it will alert you as soon as a problem is spotted.
Site Vigil is available for a free 40 day trial, give it a try by going to the download page.
To look at the program features in more detail take an online tour of the product
We have a large reference section and a set of case studies to help you
with all your monitoring needs.