I have a customer who told me my site's too slow, that the Ping results are like 40ms, which is bad compared to those that are 0ms. He did the ping tests here:

http://webservices.cnet.com/Ping/

How reliable are these results and is my customer justified in saying my site is slow? I'm on VenturesOnline's network btw.

I don't like those "how fast is your service/connection" tests. Particularly in this case because it does not tell you what backbones they are testing from. If you are on the same backbone, obviously your response times are going to be faster than if you are on a different backbone, even if that backbone is better.

Tell your customer, that for a truly accurate solution they should use Keynote, because Keynote lists all of their providers, and what city on that backbone they are pinging from (last time I checked, Keynote also cost a couple of grand a month :D).

About 7 years ago, I used to work for a dial up provider. We would have customers who would call complaining about 200 ms ping times. A friend of mine (who is no longer in customer service), used to tell people that they could even think the phrase 200 ms in 200 ms, so they should shut up about it :D (a lot of people seemed cancel after talking to him).

Tell your customer those so called 'site speed meter' is useless. It is so useless that the only reason CNET put it in their site is to get more banner impression :). More serious reason follows:

1. It only tests connection from CNET site. If the site is slower when accessed from CNET, doesn't mean it is always slower when accessed from other place. CNET is only one point on the Internet, not the center of the Internet :)

2. It only tests ping. Ping only tests latency, how fast a packet reach from CNET to your site and back again to CNET. It doesn't test other parameters such as throughput which is more important than latency, especially when a web site is accessed by multiple visitors at the same time.

3. At last but not least, it doesn't measure the server performance at all.

Yes very good points. However, in the results screen they have this:


Here are the results after averaging 10 pings to sfd as compared to other hosting provider's ping averages.
The speeds of the hosts below are the results from a combination of ping tests performed from multiple servers in North America.


What I don't know is, WHAT multiple servers are they referring to and where physically are they all located?

Another thing kinda suspicious, on the results page they list some hosts. So can the case can be made that they're just advertising these other hosts?