Web Hosting Speed Test Results From 2015 Have Arrived.

Taylor Hawkes

Author:

Understanding The Results   Watch Video

Note that these are results from 2015 for newer results see 2017 results here.

Page load speeds were tested from 100+ websites on each hosting provider. Tests were done from a computer in Washing, DC (orange) and San Fransico, CA (blue). The x-axes shows the time in seconds it took for a web page to load, the y-axes shows the number of websites that loaded a page in a particular amount of time.

Disclosure: I receive commissions on a referral bases from most of these web hosting companies. I spend a lot of time and work very hard putting together and keeping this data up to date, relevant, unbiased and accurate as possible.

Summary Of Results

The previously untested company Arvixe was the fastest by a pretty substantial amount in 2015. Linode came in second, with iPage trailing close behind. Last year’s champ Yahoo tied in 3rd with GoDaddy and Bluehost. IXWeb Hosting & HostMySite trailed in back, although they were still a lot faster than last year’s losers.

A few interesting things I noticed this year was that the standard deviation between hosting providers have decreased quite a bit. It looks like the companies that were slow last year: Bluehost, DreamHost, HostGator have improved quite a bit and the fastest companies last year (Yahoo,iPage), have not improved and even decreased slightly. This resulted in not having any really slow companies - which makes the results a little less fun IMO.

The other thing I found interesting was how the companies known for VPS/enterprise hosting (Linode,Rackspace, Amazon) are not substantially outperforming the shared hosting companies. Most shared hosting companies offer VPS/Dedicated hosting which is likely a large portion of the test results, but even so, I would have never have thought GoDaddy, Bluehost, iPage to outperform Amazon Web Hosting & Rackspace. All the uber geeks (including myself) swear by AWS, Rackspace & Linode, but we may need to recognize that the other players are just as (and even more) serious - at least when it comes to performance.

These results have been updated in March, 2015. You may see last years results here or 2013 results here .


Testing Methods

There are tons of factors that go into website loading speed, many of which are outside the control of a web host. However some factors are very much in control of a web host and those are the factors that we want to analyze and compare between hosting providers.

The primary two factors are the servers processing power and then the bandwidth (transfer rate) of the website content. In testing I attempted to focus on these two factors.

Since hosting providers will set up websites on various servers I needed to test the speed of a number of different websites, so that we could get a good feel for how fast their servers are on the whole. I tested at least 100 hundred sites for every hosting provider.

The other variable I wanted to account for is physical location of the testing computer, since a website hosted on the east coast will take longer to load from a computer on the west coast than a computer on the east coast I wanted to test from a couple a locations.

I also wanted to test websites that were regularly used, but not huge (like google) because most big websites have special technologies for website loading. To meet these requirements I tested only the speed of websites getting anywhere from 300-10,000 monthly visitors.

Other Notes

There were a few results that were over 10 seconds, but I threw them out as their may have been a network hang.

To measure variance I ran the same test a few times and saw no substantial changes.

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