Everyone wants it! Nowadays, it seems you just can't get enough of it, and there is no such thing as too fast! Fast cars, fast women, fast food, fast lifestyles, fast servers, fast machines, and fast sites. The faster the better, right?
There sometimes seems to be no better compliment than, "Man, he's got a fast site!" No mention of content.
How many times have I heard someone tell me, "Good site, but it's too slow." Hmmm, many times.
How much does the speed of my site have to do with my web site host? Good question.
This really depends on the connection your web site host has with the Internet. Many web site hosting companies buy their connections from large backbone providers like UUNET. At the least, they should have T3 lines (on which more soon).
Many companies have more than one connection to the Internet, which is called "multi-homing." This allows people to still be able to access your site even if one connection fails. Good web site hosts should also have backup power supplies (like diesel generators, etc.); do regular backups of their web servers; and, very importantly, have real people on site who know how to fix things quickly when they go wrong which they inevitably will!
Speed from the web site host also depends on how many web sites they put on each of their servers. If you happen to be on a server with only 100 web sites on it, versus one with 200 web sites running, your site is going to run more quickly with the first server. This is a good question to ask your potential web site hosts; i.e., "how many sites (and what kind of sites!) are you running on your servers?" You can guess quite easily what kind of sites are going to be high-traffic, and which ones would not be receiving so many hits.
The best web site hosts today use these "redundant" lines to ensure that customers' sites remain up and active, even if their primary Internet connections are temporarily unavailable. It's a good idea to check which web site hosts offer backup connections fast enough to maintain your site's performance in case of a primary line failure.
In addition to offering the fastest network connections possible, a web site host should provision its lines and circuits to use less than fifty percent of available bandwidth. Overburdened network connections will often result in poor site performance; in fact, a lightly-used T1 line will transfer data faster than an overused T3 connection (see table below). Again, be sure to ask potential web site hosts about their network capacity and utilization to be sure that your site will benefit from the fast network connections they may have advertised
Now, to address those techno terms. Most people connect to the Net from a modem (modulator-demodulator), which is actually a relatively slow device. But your web site host needs - and will have - a significantly faster connection. The chart below lists the terms that cover the different connection speeds and how fast they are in kilobits, megabits, or gigabits per second (Kbps/Mbps/Gbps). Speed is broken down into several categories. A long time ago (in Net time), in the early days of the Internet a whole decade ago, a T1 line was considered fast. Nowadays, there are many types of connections a great deal faster.
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Connection Type
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Speed
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Modems
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14.4-56 Kbs
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|
T1/DS1
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1.55 Mbps
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T3/DS3
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43 Mbps
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|
OC-1
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51.85 Mbps
|
|
OC-3
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155.52 Mbps
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|
OC-12
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622.08 Mbps
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|
OC-24
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1.244 Gbps
|
|
OC-48
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2.488 Gbps
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Most web site hosting companies are connected to the Internet by T1 & T3 lines. A T1 line can carry roughly 1.5 Mbps while a T3 can carry approximately 43 Mbps. A T3 connection provides a much larger amount of bandwidth and speed availability. However, as mentioned above, you should also check to see how many clients are hosted on any single machine. If a server is overloaded, its performance will be hindered - despite the highest high-speed Internet connection.
A T-3 is a dedicated telephone connection supporting data rates of about 43 Mbps. A T-3 line actually consists of 672 individual channels, each of which supports 64 Kbps (672 x 64 = 43008). T-3 lines are used mainly by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone - and for the backbone itself. T-3 lines are sometimes referred to as DS3 lines.
A T-1 is a dedicated telephone connection supporting data rates of 1.544 Mbps. A T-1 line actually consists of 24 individual channels, each of which supports 64 Kbps. Each 64 Kbit/second channel can be configured to carry either voice or data traffic. Most telephone companies allow you to buy just some of these individual channels, known as fractional T-1 access. T-1 lines are a popular leased line option for businesses connecting to the Internet and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) connecting to the Internet backbone. The Internet backbone itself consists of faster T-3 connections. (T-1 lines are sometimes referred to as DS1 lines.)
A fractional T-1 line has one or more channels of a T-1 service. A complete T-1 carrier contains 24 channels, each of which provides 64 Kbps. Most phone companies, however, also sell fractional T-1 lines, which provide less bandwidth but are also less expensive. Typically, fractional T-1 lines are sold in increments of 56 Kbps (the extra 8 Kbps per channel is used for data management).
Some things you can control, others you cannot. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about general Internet slowdowns. Do make sure you have a good web site host with high-speed connections and knock on wood for good luck.
However, you can take some fairly quick and easy steps so that your site downloads as quickly as possible.
We don't have room to go into all the details here, but we can give you a couple pointers. We leave you, for now, with these tips on how to make your pages smaller, and thus, FASTER:
- Careful with those graphics. Sure, everyone likes nice images, but if you can have your image look just about as nice at 10K as it does at 80K, do it! Many new graphics programs are designed with the Web in mind, such as Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and up, Ulead PhotoImpact, Corel Draw 8, and others. You can save images that look nice at a reasonable size with these programs.
- Careful with your code. Some popular WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design programs (like NetObjects Fusion and Dreamweaver) generate lots of extra funky code (and add images like transparent GIFs) and do unexpected things to your tables, like unnecessary nesting, which dramatically increases the size of your web pages.
If possible, edit your code, or at least break up those big tables into a number of smaller ones, which will at least appear to load faster. If you can't edit the code yourself, consider using Dreamweaver or another program to do it - they have some useful features such as "Clean Up HTML" and "Clean Up WORD HTML" - always a good idea! - which you might want to explore.
Author: Clicksee Network Co.
