HI everyone,

I'm just getting ready to build my website and had a question about webhosting and website load speed.

I know that a website should be built so that it loads as quickly as possible, but what I was wondering is, does the webhost you use also have a determining factor in how fast your webpages load?

Thanks,

Debra

Yes they do!

They do to a certain extent. Sure, the closer you are to the server(s) of the web hosting company the quicker your site will load, but let's not forget it also depends on the size and graphics of the page too.

Webmasters should remember that when you build a site not everyone has high speed internet. Think of the people who are on dial-up. I doubt they are going to wait one full minute to have that nice flash intro that took you a while to make, load up.

They sure do, the closer you are to the servers of the web hosting company the faster your site will load.

and the less overloaded their servers are with other sites consuming resources as well.

Hi Debra,

The speed at which your website loads is determined by several factors. If your site is mostly static HTML and images, you can usually get away with standard shared webhosting accounts - speed should be good and can be improved by making your content as cacheable as possible (ie. proxy servers throughout the internet can keep copies closer to your users etc.)

If your site is mainly dynamic- i.e. PHP, Perl, ASP pages with database queries; then you'll either need to look at a shared account with low contention (few accounts per server) or your own dedicated server to ensure you are able to serve lots of users without a slowdown. Of course, determining the right level of provision to maintain your expected pageloading times depends on just how much work your dynamic site is doing and how many users you expect to serve.