Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : What should be acceptable stats for a shared hosting account?

[apples17]

I have a shared reseller account with Hostgator.

What are acceptable loading speed times etc. Using pingdom, it says that my fastest response time is 387ms, slowest is 525ms and the average time is 431ms.
1. Is this average time of 431ms good/bad etc?
2. Is it good or bad for hostgator?
3. Is is the "norm" for reseller accounts?

First byte time. What should I be seeing for an average first byte time with my hostgator reseller account?

Peter

[HostLeet]

It depends on where in the world you are located. Also, "ms" stands for milli-second in case you're wondering.

[Serverfruit-Kris]

Originally Posted by HostLeet

It depends on where in the world you are located. Also, "ms" stands for milli-second in case you're wondering.

He stated he use Pingdom. Pingdom monitor from multiple locations all over the world, so he see the average of the different locations.

[apples17]

yeah I got that ms part.

This is the reply I got from Hostgator regarding their records of uptime.

Hello,

Here are the uptime information that you are requesting.

*** The uptime for the server itself ***
root@canter [~]# uptime
01:38:11 up 34 days, 20:18, 1 user, load average: 2.30, 2.70, 2.99

*** The webserver's uptime ***
root@canter [~]# service httpd fullstatus | grep uptime
Server uptime: 20 hours 53 minutes


----------------------------------------
Is that all normal?

[m8internet]

From pingdom, my server returns an average of 28ms
Therefore 431ms is rather slow

20 hours of uptime is rather low
I would suggest setting up a long term stat program and compare them over several weeks and months

[HostLeet]

Originally Posted by apples17

yeah I got that ms part.

This is the reply I got from Hostgator regarding their records of uptime.

Hello,

Here are the uptime information that you are requesting.

*** The uptime for the server itself ***
root@canter [~]# uptime
01:38:11 up 34 days, 20:18, 1 user, load average: 2.30, 2.70, 2.99

*** The webserver's uptime ***
root@canter [~]# service httpd fullstatus | grep uptime
Server uptime: 20 hours 53 minutes


----------------------------------------
Is that all normal?

Are you asking about the server's speed load times or about the server's uptime? They are two completely different things.

[SceneGroup]

It's hard to comment on the uptime when we don't know the history of these servers, i.e. was there a scheduled maintenance 20 hours ago and what was the uptime prior to it?

In terms of the ms, 431ms is horrible and will slow things down quite a bit. However this is affected by the location of the monitors. For comparison we get 120-160ms from US to Scandinavia which is fine. 431ms sounds more like there is a performance issue in the network, possibly a bad router or just too much traffic.

[apples17]

Well using webpagetest.org my first byte times seem to be a bit slow sometimes. Sometimes it gets and A and then sometimes maybe a B or C.

And reloading pages and surfing my site seems slow. Like, it hangs for a bit sometimes. Mind you hotgator is in the USA and I'm down under in Australia.

I'll tell you one thing though, I have a site hosted here in OZ on a dedicated server and holy moly it's bang, bang , bang, loading pages and clicking through cpanel and whm etc.

Anyway,,,,

431ms sounds more like there is a performance issue in the network, possibly a bad router or just too much traffic.
So where would this be, physically at hostgators end or just anywhere between here and there?

How about a tracert?

14 277 ms 244 ms 247 ms te7-2.dsr01.dllstx3.networklayer.com [70.87.253.10]
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 245 ms 245 ms 245 ms te5-1.car12.dllstx6.networklayer.com [70.87.254.226]

Are you asking about the server's speed load times or about the server's uptime? They are two completely different things
Well I want to see what is an acceptable load time and was also wanting to check the up time as pingdom threw up a warning..

[SceneGroup]

Timeout in traceroute is always a bad sign. Try doing traceroute both ways, from your own computer to server and from the server to your computer and see if the problem exists both ways. Send the results to HostGator's support and ask a network engineer to take a look.

The problem can be at HostGator's end or somewhere in between. I think they use SoftLayer, what kind of traceroute results you get for softlayer.com?

[JamesOakley]

The difference from slowest to fastest is 525-387ms, which is 138ms. This is typical for Pingdom, who use a range of servers in several locations. The locations nearer to the server will always be faster. Crossing the Atlantic adds about 200ms to the ping time, so you'd expect a server in the US to be slower from European test centres by about that amount.

So the measure of how well the site performs is the 387ms figure, because that is probably the figure that nearly disregards the time it takes for the traffic to reach the data centre. For example, if I run Pingdom checks on a site I have that is hosted in Dallas, TX, the Pingdom test servers that are in Dallas (I think they have 3 there in different DCs) all give about 50ms response time. The Pingdom test servers from further away take longer.

So then the question: Is 387ms slow? Well it depends on the page that is loading. If it's a static html page, then it's painfully slow. If it requires running several databases and crunching them through PHP, it's probably not bad for a shared host.

If you're experiencing slowness generally, one option you have is to ask HG to move your account onto a different server. See if that helps.

The last comment to make is that obviously a dedicated server that just servers up your site and a few others, and is located down the road from you, is going to be much faster than a shared server in the USA. But then again, the budget for those two options is very different.

[apples17]

If I tracert to softlayer I get node number 8 like this

8 226 ms 223 ms * po5.bbr01.eq01.dal01.networklayer.com [173.192.18.140]

Dd it three time and same thing.