When I first started out with my own website about 4 years ago i signed up with some random webhost. I don’t even remember the name of it. Then I had a short period where I just ran my personal blog on blogspot, before switching back to a self hosted version.
Currently I am using justhost.com. So far they seemed pretty good. The best part was that it only costs me $3 a mont to host my websites. They offer unlimited space, transfers, domain, subdomains….pretty much everything unlimited. Not bad for 3 bucks. However, about 1 year ago, after my first one year subscription ran out, they bumped up the price from $3 to $8, so I wrote them an email and they “happily” refunded $43 just to charge me with another random $27, which never got resolved.
I didn’t pay to much attention to it, but last week I got another invoice about almost $60 for 6 months, which is still not that bad considering that they offer unlimited everything…right.
You would think, but sharing a server with lots of other people/websites can result in a slow website and slower loading times, which is never good for user experience. Meanwhile I also started hosting small personal websites for a couple friends, as well as creating a bunch more websites of my own….
So I got talking to one of my friends, who is also hosting his own websites. And he offered me some space on one of his servers. He is hosting his websites on mediatemple.
Being a little ticked of at justhost, I decided to give mediatemple a try. He set me up with a test account and I moved one of my sites over to mediatemple to see which one performs better.
Here’s the tools I used to test my website performance:
loads.in
www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
www.iwebtool.com/speed_test
www.webpagetest.org/
www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/speedtester.html
tools.pingdom.com
loadimpact.com
I did a total of 17 tests with those 8 sites.
Here’s what I found out:
- mediatemple was faster 14 times out of the 17 tests
- in some instances the site on mediatemple loaded in 3s as opposed to 20s on justhost
Here’s the loadtimes for both sites from loads.in
| Plesk | Justhost | |
| Ashburn USA Safari | 5.2 | 21.15 |
| Vancouver | 19.8 | 17 |
| NY | 5.7 | 20.44 |
| San Fran | 10.4 | 15.3 |
| Florida | 25.1 | 23.6 |
| Sydeny AUS Safari | 14 | 20.4 |
| Auckland | 19.9 | 19.3 |
| Melbourne | 17.9 | |
| Frankfurt Safari | 3 | 20 |
| pingdom.com | 1 | 10.64 |
| http://www.websiteoptimization.com | 20.36 | 20.03 |
| http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test | 0.46 | 1.19 |
| http://www.webpagetest.org/ | 6.15 | 13.81 |
Things got really interesting when I stress tested my website on loadimpact.com
As you can see the site hosted on justhost, right from the start, had a loadtime of over 20s, the site on mediatemple had a loadtime of only 10.3 s.
When more users accesed the site the loadtime of the mediatemple site stayed at 10.3s while the justhost site went up to 2.5minutes with 32 users, who knows how long it took with 50…it didn’t even show.
Looking at all the evidence, and going of what other people have told me, I think it is save to say that the mediatemple site is a lot faster, and better value for money. Now the only thing I have to think through is, do i want to go through all the hassle moving all my sites, files and domains to a different server?