Should you check ping response time of hosting servers before buying?

A lot of people do it. They ping the web hosting servers of the company they are interested in and check the response time before they make a decision. I guess, the response time is of a great concern to a lot of us. But should you be relying on the ping response time numbers to make a decision?

Why people check the ping response time of web hosting servers?

A lot of people believe that the lesser the response time is, the faster will their website be if hosted on the server that responds faster. This is actually true. If a server responds faster to your ping requests, your websites are also going to open faster (given the assumption that your server’s hardware is processing your website at optimum level). If you place two identical servers on two different networks, your website will load faster from the server which has faster response time.

What factors affect the ping response time of servers?

There are several factors that affect the ping response of servers. Some of the important ones are listed below.

• Their physical location makes a lot of difference. If they are located in another country, the response time will be high. Likewise if they are located in the same state as that of yours, you will experience much better response time.
• Your network also is important. If your computer is connected to faster Internet connection, you might see good response time. Try pinging a server you are interested in from a dial-up connection and you will see what difference it makes.

How important really is ping response time?

I would say that ping response time is an important factor but only when you are going to host games or applications that will require a lot of back and forth communication between your servers and client browser. For general purpose websites, blogs and business websites more important factor is the bandwidth throughput of the servers the websites will be hosted on. Also remember that the response time you see could be high but for a vast majority of your website visitors, the server could actually respond much faster. So, don’t base your decision on the response time you see on your computer.

Based on our understanding, an average response time of upto 100ms should be considered good. Only when response time goes higher than 150ms to 180ms, you might experience a slight slowness in loading a website but that will also not make a lot of difference.

An example in case – the server that hosts this site responds to my pings at avg of 350ms while google.com responds in 400ms. But when it comes to opening the website, Google opens much quicker than my blog. Got the point?

Use the comments section below and let us know what you think.