Does your location affect loading time of a website?

[wen_laat]

Hi!

I've been searching for a different webhost for ages, and have now uploaded my entire website to another domain (which I also own) I've noticed that the loading time is slower for me, but when I asked the hosting company this, they told me that this might have something to do with my location. My previous host was located in the Netherlands, as am I, and the new host is located in the US. Is this true, does this make a difference? I've checked both of the sites on www.sitereportcard.com and they have the same loading time. It might be just a stupid question, but I need to make sure that my site'll load normally with the new webhost before actually committing to them for a longer period of time.

My current url is www.typicaldutchstuff.com
and the temporary url is www.onestoppods.com/index.shtml

Do you notice a big difference in loading?

Thanks!

[MarcieZoob]

Hi wen_laat, both web sites loaded exactly the same for me. I'm in the US and connect through cable.

On a side note, my sister Suzanne lives in the Netherlands, too. She's in Friesland. I will send her your web site URL, in case she doesn't have it already.

[chiron]

Allowing for the randomness and caching and IE and so forth, I would say that they loaded about the same for me as well (USA).

While I have noticed that there can be some massive differences in "countries of origin" my general reaction to blame the "distance" has proven a couple of times to be infrastructure instead. Usually the host server, balancing, volume, pipe/band, any government intervention, etc are what have caused my woes from country to country...

But keep on testing!

[Faglork]

Basically, the more "hops" you have between your computer (as visitor to a website) and the webserver where the site is hosted, the longer it will take. Just do a traceroute - you will see what I mean.
http://www.network-tools.com

So it depends on your audience:

Are you aiming for the regional/national market? If so, you should place your server right in the netherlands, preferably in a location which is only one or two hops from your national CIX. This will give your audience a connection with very few hops.

If you are aiming at an international market, the location is not critical, as long as it is reasonably close to the next CIX. Locations close to the CIX may be slighly more expensive, though.

Alex

[chiron]

I would add there, you might want to run a traceroute several times, as from my experience the hops can change quite a bit from request to request. But kudos to faglork, traceroute was precisely the word I was looking for in my late-night fugue!

[carju1]

The otherway to get a quick check on response times from servers is to just ping them. Do it a few times a day for a few days and you'll get a reasonable avergage figure.

For me from the UK the US was slower to load (about 25% more in a browser). I did a quick ping on both and it was 50ms for the Netherlands and 180ms for the US.

Have fun

Julian

[deltatrend]

Checking from Belgium. The temporary URL is noticable slower. In my experience, the 100 or 200ms difference incurred by a transatlantic hop is unimportant. The noticeable difference usually due to the response time of the servers/network at the host.

I host most of my clients sites at a company in the UK, for a worldwide audience. There are world-class providers there, and they are in the same timezone. Click my signature and you'll see the load time.

[gRF]

From Singapore, first site loads much slower then second link. But then, from here, all European hosted sites are slower then US hosted sites (because of many more and much "fatter" pipes that Asia has with USA).

The loading times depend mostly on the bandwidth of the network between your host and end user's ISP. So generally speaking, your Dutch hosted site should load faster for Duch (European) audience. If your web visitors are from all over the world, then better go with US hosted site.

[DrTandem1]

Yes, your location with regards to your server's location makes a difference. The further geographically away, the more likely it will need to take more "hops" from router to router on the internet. The more hops, the more likely you are to lose packets. Since the modern day ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) does not use error correction, as old frame relay did, a request for the lost packet will be sent from the far end back to the originating end. The originating end will then have to re-send the lost packet(s). This of course takes time.

Also, as the data can travel no faster than the speed of light at any one point, the farther away the longer the trip. You can hear this effect when TV reporters talk to field reporters using satelite phones. There is an obvious delay.

Back to the Earth-based transmission, this lost packet(s) problem is what plagues VoIP phone service. You can do a trace-route to find out the number of hops. Also, pinging your servers will give you the time in micro-seconds. You can then see the actual time difference.

[wen_laat]

Hmmm, this is making me think alot. I thought I finally found a reliable webhosting company (www.websitesource.com) which does not make my site load slower. Most of my customers are US or UK based, so I need to focus on those the most, but they are both different. Changing webhosts is so frustrating.

What would you recommend, going for a US or UK host? If so, do you have any links to good and reliable hosting companies? (which are reasonably priced)

[carju1]

Originally Posted by wen_laat

... Most of my customers are US or UK based, so I need to focus on those the most, but they are both different.

Anybody know of a good Icelandic host thats about half way between US and UK :)

I think if the pricees are compatible then you really have to go for your bigger audience market. If both US and UK are about 50% share then go for European purely because its the same timezone and easier to contact for support.

carju1

[DrTandem1]

Don't forget, some hosting companies maintain multiple servers. Ideally, you want your host to have a redundant server in a different geographic location. Having two redundant servers sitting on the same shelf in the same building will not provide redundancy, if disaster strikes.

[mikmik]

Dang, I had a link that measured server response and I can't find it now. However, here is cornicopia of info.
I remember reading about server performance, and I tested my host, readyhosting, and it was less than 2 seconds. It depends on the server load, the hardware (cpu, RAM, etc.) among other variables.

So, here are some interesting links:
Response time measurement valuable in timing network activity



Monitor Your Site’s Response TimeLearn how to monitor your site's response time, tips and trick which your host might never tell. Also discussed are the tools to measure response time and how to troubleshoot response time problems for your site.

Here is the tools page from the above -

Free tools, resources to monitor site speed, response time, ip tracing, whois look, dns check, trace route, email verification, TCP IP and more.

web-hosting.candidinfo

Lookout! Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools

14 day trial download
Web Performance Trainer™ is web load testing and web stress testing software and tools targeted at web sites that use standard technologies such as web forms, J2EE, ASP, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion, Java, etc. Its automatic analysis can tell you how many users your web site is capable of handling at one time using your own unique performance criteria. Because data is collected at the URL level, it not only identifies slow web pages, but identifies the particular part of the web page that caused the problem

[AgileConsultant]

I checked both sites from San Jose, California. I'm using a dsl connection and they seemed to load at the same speed. Maybe the fact that most of Europe is asleep right now and traffic should be at a lower volume is the reason both sites are loading at the same speed.

I have tried this before with one of my sites. Had one of the servers in Budapest, Hungary and the other server was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In that scenario, the site residing in Green Bay loaded much faster for me, where the site residing in Budapest loaded much faster for people in Europe.

[newmarket]

I use a .co.uk tld that I host on a server in the UK (accepting payments in European currencies) and a .com for the US and Asia.

You could look at a .nl for europe (or .co.uk, if you prefer) and host that site in the Netherlands or the UK. When I was deciding where to host the European site, my testing did not show a significant performance difference between NL and UK.

I'm located in Australia and page load times from hosts in Europe are dreadful. The US is ok, however.

I hope that this helps.

[newmarket]

I use a .co.uk tld that I host on a server in the UK (accepting payments in European currencies) and a .com for the US and Asia.

You could look at a .nl for europe (or .co.uk, if you prefer) and host that site in the Netherlands or the UK. When I was deciding where to host the European site, my testing did not show a significant performance difference between NL and UK.

I'm located in Australia and page load times from hosts in Europe are dreadful. The US is ok, however.

I hope that this helps.

[pipeten]

We've tried using a few dedicated servers in the US for our UK customers as bandwidth is so much cheaper but we got a lot of complaints about a lag in the time pages take to load. As soon as we switched it to the server in our Sheffield data centre in the UK the pages were loading much quicker when being viewed from the UK.

We've found our data centre in Ireland a very good compromise for users both in the US and UK as it is still very fast for viewing pages in the UK and tends to be quicker for US viewers than hosting in the UK datacentre.

[wen_laat]

I'm really getting desperate here. I really want to have a good, reliable, and affordable host which offer enough bandwidth, because I want to start using Google Adwords and Overture, and my current host just doesn't offer enough bandwidth at a reasonable price. I'm still leaning towards the US host (www.websitesource.com , because most people here do not seem to notice a big difference. Also, US hosts are cheaper, although that is not isn't the most important; I'd rather have a webhost which is very reliable, but costs a little more. Another host which I'm contemplating on signing up with is www.unitedhosting.co.uk They have great customer support, but are more expensive when it comes to bandwidth.

[cyanide]

The second website loaded slower for me.
It kind of hung a little before loading

Apart from geography, other factors can contribute to loading time, such as server speed, hardware and software as well as over-all load of the machine and number of websites on it