grammaat46

Hi Lisa Thanks for chiming in. I'm playing with traceroute now but it seems to roughshod a method. I figured someone has already found a way. I'm a member of a local club that would like to put up a website to keep our 140 members in touch. Everyone is local. Until we choose a site, we're using a subdomain on my personal site to try out software (Invisionboard, a blog, etc .) and flesh out a theme. Everyone commented on how slow it loaded and so after narrowing the field to 6 or 7 potential hosts, what's left is who loads consistently faster. Guess I'll break out Excel. Thanks everyone for the input. G.

Hi youneverknow You are right , the sites are impressive. But I'm posting with a question about how to measure a feature and it feels like you and Alan are trying to get me to sign up G.

Perhaps, I should add that I meant Yahoo's search engine and not their hosting. I can go to some sites and the text will load immediately and then the obvious moment while the graphics load. This is understandable and accepatable. Over months (years?) of use you come to notice that some sites will load faster than others. When you strip away the file type/size, net traffic, cached files and such, what you are left with is the path from you to them. My first few hops are going to be the same no matter who I am with. But I notice a big difference once I get past that point where they take different routes. The larger commercial sites always load very fast and I would guess they have multiple colocations and are sitting on very fast connections to backbones. I'm sure they pay for it too. Sites that load very fast for me are news.Google.com and SourceForge.net . There is virtually no hesitation from hitting enter 'till text begins loading on the screen. With my other website (which I visit several times a day and so should be in my cache!) I will see it first take a moment to resolve, then I wait while it says "transferring" then with 6 or 7 seconds, the bulk of the site begins to load. My homepage (the "index.html" that my browser points at) is free of graphics and should be loading so much faster. I just want a way to quantify the delay so that I can identify those hosts offering a better connection for my community. G.

I've noticed that on some websites like Yahoo and CNN, my page (with the exception of large graphics) loads almost instantly. If I visit websites that are hosted (like yours) I have some lag built in. I've been told that this is network congestion and stalling. Is there a way to test this with several potential hosts to see which site would give you the best results? I have been checking where the hosting is located (geographically) and what kind of backbone access they have, but this doesn't seem to be as accurate as I would like. Is there a way to run an application (like traceroute or ping) against the server and compare the results? Thanks G.