Internet
users are impatient. A Zona Research study found
that if your site doesn't load in 8 seconds, up to
1/3 of your visitors will leave.
Savvy eBusinesses recognize that simply having a
Web presence is no longer enough to succeed. They
need reliable high-performance Web sites that load
quickly. If you have a business on the web you
know how important your site loading speed is. If
your pages do not load swiftly then you are losing
money.
At DesignHosted.com™ our customer's enjoy faster
page loading and script execution thanks to
caching & compression technologies we've
installed. Our servers run on industry standard
content acceleration software from Zend™,
IntenseSpeed™ and HyperSpace Communications.
Together they make DesignHosted.com™ server's
incredibly fast and efficient.
Cache
The first technology we use to speed up our server
is a method known as caching. Caching engines are
implemented to reduce page loading time and script
execution by performing optimizations and various
types of caching, using advanced techniques that
yield much better performance -- usually from two
to four times more requests per second. These
engines also play an important part in cutting
down latency by as much as 20-fold, by preventing
dynamic pages from doing any repetitive work, and
reducing the turnaround time for each request.
Compression
The second method we use to boost our server
performance is mod_gzip, a compression module
which uses the standard zlib compression library
to compress output. The idea is to compress data
being sent out from the Web server, and have the
browser decompress this data on the fly, thus
reducing the amount of data sent and increasing
the page display speed. Using HTTP compression, a
performance gain of 150-160% is achieved across
all DesignHosted.com web servers. Using HTTP
Compression web pages can be 90% or so smaller and
images can be up to 50% or so smaller (depending
on how much they are compressed already).
More information about HTTP compression can be
found here.
Detailed benchmarks and test results can be found here.
- Improves site loading speed
- Higher transaction rate
- More stability for your hosted site (reduces
system and CPU load)
- Run more server side scripts, faster (PHP/CGI)
- Up to 300% performance boost on script
executions
- 150%-160% performance gain on static/dynamic
content
- Bandwidth is conserved