For those of you who are web developers, there is one tool that goes with Firefox that you should have, it’s called “Firebug“, and what it does, among other things, is measure the time every component of your web page takes to download.

     Many of you will find web hosting offers for $3-4 per month that might sound good on the surface.  I recommend you use this tool to load a page hosted on these sites (and not the sites home page because often they will put that on a different high end server), and compare the response time to sites hosted here.

     There are two important metrics to note, the time it takes the first component to start loading, this is known as time to first data, and it is important because Google assigns a higher rank to those sites that gets to first data under 200ms.  The other is the time it takes the whole page to load because the user experience is impacted there.

     If you run this on our home page, it will be the same as any equivalent user page (it is possible to write bad php or javascript code and slow a page even on a fast server) because we use the exact same servers based upon Apache 2.4.x (whatever the most current release is) everywhere, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time optimizing and fine tuning it.

     I’ve also spent time optimizing the supporting infrastructure, disk I/O, caching, etc. I want my customers to be successful, and to that end I do my best to give you every advantage.  Most of these low end providers only want to minimize their cost per customer in order to maximize their profits.