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I'm looking for the equivalent of consumer reports for hosting companies. But I would be happy with any neutral data comparing one site to another.

Does anyone have any links to data the speed of various popular hosting sites versus one another?

I've seen this question about measuring your own website, I want to see measurements for other hosts against each other.

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  • Even if such a service existed how would it account for the actual applications, scripts, files etc that were on the domains they were testing?
    – Anagio
    Jul 22, 2012 at 20:45
  • @Anagio - By having some kind of test control, like a sample website.
    – Mark Rogers
    Jul 22, 2012 at 21:26

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BestHostRatings.com has an Uptime Report which may be of some interest, however, having worked at various hosting companies, I should qualify that recommendation by stating that (a) only the most amateurish companies will host their own sites on servers used for customer sites and (b) larger companies will implement redundant sites (i.e. they will have multiple datacenters) and will likely show no downtime, as datacenter outages are generally few and far between (and the likelihood of multiple datacenters with multiple uplinks going down simultaneously isn't very good).

In short, the performance of a company's own site has very little to do with the performance you can expect from a site hosted with the company.

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    I suppose the OP meant comparision of client/real websites hosted with various hosts (and not the website of the hosting company).
    – JP19
    Jan 16, 2011 at 6:43
  • @JP19 - It's quite possible that such sites do exist but the host "storefront uptime" charts are far more common. I would read hosting providers' forums and talk to their actual customers (and check out webhostingtalk.com) to get a feel for reliability, however, that information is neither neutral nor unbiased (i.e. if you're talking to one of the company's customers, that person obviously still thinks the company is doing a passable job - and vice versa for former customers whose experience is rarely recent)
    – danlefree
    Jan 16, 2011 at 9:15
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Short answer: I don't know & I don't think there will be one that will provide an objective assessment due to the complexity involved and the lack of incentive.

Long answer: A metrics-based approach to pick a good host is a great idea. However, it will be hard to compare as there are a lot of factors (like cost, geography, uptime, support, web server platform, visitor count) not just response time that decide whether a hosting company is good. One of 2 competing sites that we compare could host its static assets on a CDN while picking an average-rated Host. Unless you factor in all these attributes, it would be like comparing apples & oranges.

For a subjective assessment, you may find these sites helpful - HTTParchive.org (which tracks response times & other stats for a large number of sites) & Netcraft (which tracks Hosting companies).

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