[thelist] ServerBeach... what does the world think?

Ian Anderson ian at zstudio.co.uk
Fri Sep 23 04:25:11 CDT 2005


Mark Aldrich wrote:

> 
> Also whats the quality of service like?...you can have all the bandwidth in
> the world but if it only comes down at 2kb/s it doesnt matter does it? :) I
> am based in the UK  and they are in the US, would this be an issue in
> general terms?
> 

You can test part of this yourself - the additional network latency 
caused by the distance. Find out some sites that they host, then ping 
them from Terminal or the Command shell. Then compare it with your 
current host.

e.g. In Windows command shell, at the C:\> prompt type:

ping somedomain.com

The computer will bounce four packets off the server and report the 
average time taken.

For example, my server in the UK has an average ping of 23 milliseconds 
from where I live (about 200 miles away).

My other server in the US pings at 167ms, which gives you an idea of the 
difference the transatlantic hops make. You wouldn't want to play Quake 
off it, for example.

It doesn't tell you about sustained download speed, but it is 
interesting. The difference between these two numbers affects every file 
requested from the server. I am not sure it is significant at the user 
level, since we tend not to notice delays <0.5 seconds, but the US site 
doesn't feel as snappy in response as the UK one does. Probably 
psychological, since I know one of them is about 6000 miles further away...

Hope this helps

Cheers

Ian


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