Website response times - Is your webhost doing a good job?
Quite a while ago I setup an account at mon.itor.us and recently I was looking at the various stats that they are producing, not too bad for a freebie 
Here’s an example of the recent http response times for my website.
As you can see in the graph above, from the monitoring stations in Austria, Germany and USA the response times are a bit all over the place and not very consistent across the day.
Looking at the graph for the previous day we can see a few hour gap of no response at all, only timeouts. Ahh don’t we all just love our Dreamhost accounts
I setup another monitor to check http performance of one of my VPS machines, this one tested is in Germany, in the graph below you can see that the http response times are a lot more consistent across the day.
So I then moved my personal site to a server locally here in Australia, and even though it’s a lot further away from the monitoring stations the results are very consistent across the day.
I’m not sure if I’ll leave my site here in AU in the long term and I have started thinking about the other domains I have in my Dreamhost account.
In summary, this confirms that while Dreamhost are “great value” in many regards, if you spend a bit more money you’ll probably get a lot better performance.
Maybe I’ll shift all my sites to one of my VPS’s in Europe or USA where the performance of dedicated resources will be a lot better than what you might get on Dreamhost shared hosting.
Then again I got shared hosting so I didn’t have to worry about maintaining a server and the associated software, my catch 22.
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I would like to see your response graphs of Dreamhost for right now(1615 Saturday 20 October). There seems to be a hole where Dreamhost was.
I haven’t been monitoring any domains at Dreamhost using this service, however I did note about an hour or so of downtime today
[...] Good mon.itor.us review at Website response times - Is your webhost doing a good job? by Joseph Burford which clearly demonstrated the value of monitoring. Joseph uses Dreamhost hosting but noticed that the response time was not very consistent which affects his web user experience. He then moved the site: So I then moved my personal site to a server locally here in Australia, and even though it’s a lot further away from the monitoring stations the results are very consistent across the day. [...]