This is the age of the split-second Internet decision, and attention spans are shrinking into  nothingness. Your website needs to impress the visitor at a glance, and it’s hard to do when it takes so long to load that your prospective customer says “Ah, screw it” and backs out to Google to see if your competitor functions faster.

This is why hosting is about so much more than cost. Many smaller business sites take advantage of “shared hosting,” where many sites are hosted on one server and isolated on different partitions. Price-wise, shared hosting is rock bottom – you will be able to host your site for a few bucks per month. However, this option gives you a bare-bones minimum of customer support, and when it comes to speed, shared hosting can be a logjam of frustration.

Managed hosting is a good balance between cost and attention. With 3P Managed Hosting, you get personalized service and troubleshooting for a modest increase in cost; just as important, your site loading times are going to be vastly improved.

To illustrate the point, we ran a comparison between two of our clients: Client S, which uses shared hosting, and Client L, whose site is housed on 3P Managed Hosting. We used the website WhichLoadsFaster.com to run several tests on the main pages and several inner pages of the two clients’ websites. These tests were run on Jul 26 2013, from 1:30-2:00 PM.

First, we compared loading times on the two main site pages. Loading time in milliseconds on the left refers to Client S; on the right, Client L.

Test 1:
Client L loads 2.2 × faster
3223 ms / 1439 ms

Test 2:
Client L loads 55% faster
2509 ms / 1618 ms

Test 3:
Client L loads 2.5 × faster
3715 ms / 1465 ms

I think we’re seeing a trend here.

Next, we compared 3 inner page loading times. For rough parity, we compared the “About Us,” “Contact Us” pages and one product or service page. For each site, WhichLoadsFaster.com loads the three pages one after the other and totals the time it takes for all three. Here are the results, again Client S is on the left and Client L is on the right:

Test 1:
Client L loads 99% faster
9807 ms / 4933 ms

Test 2:
Client L loads 2.0 × faster
10863 ms / 5383 ms

Test 3:
Client L loads 76% faster
9627 ms / 5456 ms

Parallel loading vs sequential loading (meaning, whether the speed tester loads both websites at once or one after the other, so they don’t have a chance to interfere with each other) makes no difference – 3P Managed Hosting knocks the socks off shared hosting every time.

Remember that a typical visitor who is looking to buy something is not just going load a single page – they will navigate around the website before making a commitment. A slow site doesn’t just cause a single moment of frustration, but does it with every mouse click. If you want to present a favorable impression to your potential customers, having a website that loads quickly and allows a visitor to navigate without frustration is one of the most important things you can do – and 3P Managed Hosting is here to help.