I've looked around for a post addressing this kind of issue but failed to find one and so I apologise if this is posted to the wrong forum - please move it if there's a more suitable place.

I am looking for advice/recommendations on shared web hosting providers.

We have a small retail website on a (popular) shared host. The site is mainly dynamic (using Perl/MySQL) but its home page is static. We get around 150-200 visits a day according to Google Analytics.

A while ago I began to get worried about the subjective response times we were seeing and I set up an experiment to monitor response time. We use two different hosting companies for two variants of the site (.com and .co.uk) and so I was able to write a program to access one from the other and record the results.

The monitoring program runs hourly and records the time taken to retrieve

1. the Google front page (for reference);
2. a static site page;
3. a typical site page (with a few SELECTs).

Only the html page text is retrieved - a real visitor to the site would see a slightly longer response than recorded as css file, images, etc. have to be transferred and rendered.

I've been monitoring for about a month now and the results are:

Worst Response Times
Google 1 second
static page 181 seconds (yes, 3 minutes)
dynamic page 80 seconds

Best Response Times
Google 0 second (i.e. 0-1)
static page 0 second
dynamic page 1 seconds (i.e. 1-2)

Average Times at 16:30UTC
Google 0.25 second
static page 0.89 second
dynamic page 5.36 seconds

The results show that it isn't a site code problem (if it was then the minimum times would be longer) but that the host performance degrades rapidly with load.

We feel that most users, especially broadband users, will not hang around for much more than 4 seconds and so we are losing traffic as well as user confidence.

Can anyone recommend a (shared) web hosting provider who is prepared to provide some kind of service level agreement not simply for uptime (they all claim nearly 100%) but for actual response time or some equivalent measure?

All other suggestions are welcome!

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