I am looking at a host and everything I hear on the boards is excellant nothing bad whatsoever and they are well regarded with lots of mention in message threads.

I have been doing my own due dilligance which includes ping test and testing through Netmechanic on approx. 6 domains that are hosted with them. So far I placed tests on this past Friday evening and Saturday from 11.00 to 7.00 EST.

Ping traceroute tests from various locations were generally from40 - 80ms from anywhere in the U.S. and Canada and a little higher from overseas.

My concern is the Netmechanic tests which were given a poor rating due to connect time and download time being above average. I have posted a sample at the following url
http://216.234.185.32/netmechanic/test.html.

In my own test of just loading the domain address I noticed a small lag before the page displayed, maybe a 2-3 steamboat count but then things came up quickly.

While I prefer to keep the host name private at this time (I have sent them the results for comment) they are on the Alabanza network.

Could anyone comment on the reliability of these tests, whether they would be concerned, meaning etc.etc.

The Netmechanic tests are somewhat hard to understand. I still don't get the DNS lookup test. Every server I tried (including mine) always gets a 0.00 as average query time. Now I think that should automatically constatitute a 100% percentile on that test.

From the looks of your test, the connection time and download times are very bad. Either the server is bogged down, or the network (Alabanza) is bogged down.

To see if their servers are slow or if it was just the network, you might want to try the test again. And at the same time, run a test on another host thats on Alabanza. If the other host is much faster, then you know this hosts servers are bogged down.