Hi,

i am curiuous to know what the general acceceptable ping speed for web hosting companies is? the hosting companies that i use one pings at 128 and the other at 32 are theese acceptable speeds? or are they ridiculously slow? or just a little slow? they are both bargain hosts($15 for one and $20 for the other/year)

thanks,
carl,

p.s i hope that i placed this in the correct forum

Well, ping times are not really a measure of anything. It doesn't test the line speed.

Ping times have everything to do with the client AND the server. If the client is 3 hops off a backbone on a crappy connection, you could have really high ping times. On the other hand, if you have a computer connected to a backbone, it may be able to reach other computers with times under 5ms.

Roundtrip times for ping packets tell nothing about the quality of the host.

If a ping time gets to be over 150 from a decent DSL or Cable line, I'd check things in the datacenter, anything under that it nothing to be alarmed about.

one host that i pinged pinged at 284! but i dont use them

Are you your site's only visitor?

Ping to yourself is rarely relevant unless you're on a backbone near most of your site's customers. Look at it this way: If you lived in the Antarctic, a 10ms ping to your host would probably mean a 900ms ping for everyone else in the world.

let me show you a little example of how inaccurate a ping can be for measuring speed:

Pinging domain.co.uk [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=126
Reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=126
Reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=126
Reply from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=126

Ping statistics for 81.97.224.70:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 10ms, Maximum = 30ms, Average = 20ms

C:\>

OK, the domain i pinged was a friend of mine. His server is just for his personal site, hosted on a 128k upload cable connection.

See what i mean, 128k upload is slow, but the ping times are good. why? because it all depends where the packets have to go

Right, as I said, ping times have nothing to do with speed. I mean, just think about what pings are; VERY small packets, hence speed not being an issue. Now, since all light travels at the same speed (well, to be technical it doesn't, but that accuracy is not needed in this statement), a ping's time will be determined by two things.

First, how far, physically, the packet has to go.
Second, router and line quality, that can slow down packets.