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What is more important for webhosting?
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What is more important for webhosting?

alterarchalterarch Member
edited March 2013 in General

Is ping or download speed more important for standard website hosting?

Comments

  • JacobJacob Member

    Each factor depends on your usage, but having lower ping and bandwidth at your immediate disposal is always better.

  • I do not think download speed matters unless there are too heavy files (in MBs) to be loaded. Ping matters a bit that only accounts for very few seconds no matter how far you host the site.

    I have experienced hosting in east coast, west coast and europe while I am in asia. Using Anycast DNS, as many static files (caching), serving compressed files and using a CDN helps quite a bit.

  • That's a bit of a rock and hard place type of question – but it really does all come down to the type of content being hosted. If your serving lots of pages then obviously ping times can have a big impact – but if your offering any downloads at all then I’d say most people notice slow downtime speeds more than they notice slow ping response times. Good question though - be interested to see what others think.

  • Uptime is important.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    If you are looking for real performance, then both are important. Web pages aren't tiny blobs of text and tags anymore, and include a lot of (relatively) large static assets like images, scripts, stylesheets, etc. While latency is important to have everything respond quickly, the speed is important to quickly finish the downloads of static assets. More often than not, latency and speed are related to each other anyway.

    To get an idea of at what point the speed difference between two options stops mattering, for example, calculate the total amount of data that has to be transfered to load a page with all assets. If the loading time difference becomes less than say 40-50ms, you can safely assume that a visitor won't notice it.

  • @budingyun said: Uptime is important.

    Hehe - well yes! That out of everything is the single most important factor, but that being said it was out of those two options. I will say one good point about having a slow download speed (hey - hear me out!) is it really does force you to consider every element you add and then try to find the best ways to improve performance (via the likes of spites)

  • download speed, in my opinion

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    I don't think ping matters so much, unless it gets too high. Although ping does limit bandwidth to some extent.

  • @perennate said: I don't think ping matters so much, unless it gets too high. Although ping does limit bandwidth to some extent.

    I'm not really sure how this works but I've seen some crazy results in my search for a VPS. For example the test file from eoreality downloaded with 10 Mib/s but the ping took >200ms.

  • shovenoseshovenose Member, Host Rep

    throughput is more important generally but for voip you need great ping.

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    @Vladorz said: I'm not really sure how this works but I've seen some crazy results in my search for a VPS. For example the test file from eoreality downloaded with 10 Mib/s but the ping took >200ms.

    Well, TCP takes some time to adjust to low pings, especially because of limit on number of unacknowledged packets allowed. But that time is very low, expected RTT updates pretty rapidly.

  • icySrvicySrv Member
    edited March 2013

    For any content that has a huge file size or are numerous in numbers, I think the download speed will have more priority. Low ping will matter in services like game servers, voip, vpn etc, where high latency = bad performance.

    @SCDaniel said: Hehe - well yes! That out of everything is the single most important factor, but that being said it was out of those two options. I will say one good point about having a slow download speed (hey - hear me out!) is it really does force you to consider every element you add and then try to find the best ways to improve performance (via the likes of spites)

    Correct me if I am wrong, but think if there are many elements, ping will be more important as the browser will need to send multiple http requests for each item. Wouldn't download speed be immaterial as the sprite size might be identical to the cumulative size of all the multiple elements? :D

  • Latency matters followed by throughput.

    Lowest latency you can achieve with highest throughput the viewer/user can achieve.

    High latency can/will destroy throughput.

  • @icySrv said: as the browser will need to send multiple http requests for each item.

    You're wrong ;) Any recent browser will only use the same TCP connection (or a couple of them) for all the http requests. This is what the KeepAlive header is about and it was introduced as an extension of HTTP/1.0 a long time ago.

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