Speed test

Update 3/24/2009: As Chad mentions in the comments below, the comparison here is not really fair. We’ve been building some really high-traffic sites lately, and any virtual server will hit their limits under enough load. In other words, what’s the use of having The Fastest Server in Town if it crashes when it gets super-duper-boy-band-popular?

Update 3/24/2009: Because Mosso is missing some features that we desperately need for an upcoming job, we have been forced to leave them. I wasn’t happy about this, because their service is excellent, and the speed was great. We moved to a Dedicated-Virtual 3.5 - Base plan at Media Temple. For half the price, we get less disk space, and I was thinking it would be a bit slower. I was wrong. I’ve updated the chart below to reflect Media Temple’s speed test results for the same site.

This week was a bad one to be hosting with Dreamhost. I didn’t do any real tests to count downtime, but sites were slow and even inaccessible many times throughout the week. Sometimes, these fits would only last 10 minutes, but when you host ~30 sites on the same account, you will be notified if a site is down or painfully slow.

Let me make this clear: I know that Dreamhost is a value host, and it does give a great value for the money. They basically offer no limits on anything for $10/mo. That’s crazy cheap. Therefore, I wouldn’t expect them to offer the same speed or the reliability of a $100/mo host such as Mosso. This comparison is simply to share our site load time change when I switched one very large and demanding site from Dreamhost to Mosso.

(The site I tested is a Drupal site with caching turned off. (I tested it both ways on Dreamhost, but I can’t test Mosso with caching until it builds up a bit. I’ll post those results here as well.) The site is very heavy on images, and moderately heavy on CSS and Javascript. Nothing was changed on the site between the switch. The total page load size was 408.4 KB. Load time was checked using Pingdom Tools. I tested each host 5 times and these are the averages.)

As you can see, Mosso Media Temple loads the site in roughly less than half the time as Dreamhost. For 10X 5X the cost, I’ll take it. As a web developer, I must be able to depend on our host. Obviously, this test only shows speed improvement, but I am speculating that downtime will also be greatly reduced (Update: Now, the downtime is only a result of the configuration of LAMP, which is frustrating as well).

Have you had a similar or not-so-similar experience? Leave a comment below.