Comparing hosting on SSD here vs HDD

[jensen]

Just want to share the benefits of hosting on SDD cloud based servers here at x10hosting.com vs my other host on HDD with lightspeed servers.

If you looked at the 1st image - that's a site hosted here
the 2nd speed test image is the same site but hosted on another server. Yes the geographic location will also play a role but just want to highlight the fact that the servers here really make a difference.

The sites are exactly the same, no coding differences. ok some noted that one was based on a US server and the other was based in Sweden. Will try to test again and post more images.

Also strange that the page size is different. Wonder why? The site is copied and pasted, every single file so I don't know how to explain the difference in file size between the 1st and 2nd test.

 

[jensen]

Ok here's the 2nd round of testing and manage to get the site tested from Sweden and compare to the same site.
So can we say that hosting here at x10hosting makes one's website fly?

Can anyone here explain the difference and how to get a better comparison?

Side question: I still cannot explain why the same site has a bigger page size when hosting else where but on x10hosting the page size "shrinks"? Is that why the page loads faster?

 

[Dead-i]

Hi jensen,

Can anyone here explain the difference and how to get a better comparison?

The SSD storage is not the only factor making your x10Hosting website fast, but Varnish is caching certain assets of your website. The CSS, JavaScript and image files on your x10Hosting website are temporarily stored in Varnish's memory, so that it can send them to visitors without significant increases to the page load time. If you look in Chrome's developer tools, you can check which resources are cached by Varnish by checking whether the "X-Cache" header is "HIT" in the Network tab.

Side question: I still cannot explain why the same site has a bigger page size when hosting else where but on x10hosting the page size "shrinks"? Is that why the page loads faster?

Good question! I am not too familiar with this side of things, but I'm fairly certain this is due to our Varnish cache server compressing data with Gzip before sending it to the browser. This helps to keep file sizes, bandwidth and load times down. Your other Apache server doesn't compress data with Gzip before sending it, which is why it has the higher size.

You can usually tell if compression is used by looking at the Content-Encoding header in the response. There's a Wikipedia article on how it works here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression

Thank you,

 

[jensen]

Thanks Dead-i, am learning new stuff because of this forums and because of people like you.

Have just learnt that x10hosting has Varnish. You get such good hosting features here. Am learning to ensure my site uses caching to further speed up the site.

 

[jensen]

https://gtmetrix.com/compare/8NvVe8xr/AnhmUUDI

PageSpeed Grade
YSlow Grade
Page load time
Total page size
Total # of requests

PageSpeed Grade - x10hosting gets a D but my other host gets an A???
Page load time - x10hosting wins hands down. 1.8sec vs 7.4 sec

Here's another comparison for the 2 sites but on GTmetrix this time but x10hosting is not favourable compared. Now have to check up PageSpeed. It faults x10hosting for having a D grade speed.

However GTmetrix gives good scores for x10hosting for Page Load time and Page Size. Instead of 3.0MB as in the last test yesterday, it's only 2.65MB. So the caching is really good here at x10host.


webpagetest.org gives another picture for the results. It gives 3As and 2Fs for the website hosted at x10hosting.

But on the lightspeed server on HDD here are the results.

 

[jensen]

When we build a page, it's not just about how well it looks but how well it loads. Especially now that more and more people access the web from their mobile phones. So if it takes too long to load, then the visitor will just go to the next website.

 

[AidanLumina]

Thanks for collecting all these stats! I'm 100% sure now that I've chosen the best free hosting provider!

The loading times are way better than those of most other sites, I can confirm that. x10hosting is really doing a great job here! ^-^