From Media Temple to WebFaction: part 2

Published on 24^th March 2009 in Websites, tagged hosting, Media Temple, WebFaction.

A couple of weeks ago I moved my web hosting from Media Temple to WebFaction. Just before I did, I signed up for a 30 day free trial with Pingdom, who offer an uptime and latency monitoring service. Having had my websites monitored for a couple of weeks, I can now evaluate the difference between the two hosts, and the results are striking:

As you can see, the difference before and after I moved is huge. Not only is the response time on WebFaction far more consistent, but it’s significantly lower. You might imagine that this difference has been caused by the servers being in different physical locations and the monitoring service is now closer to WebFaction than it was to Media Temple. However, Pingdom alternate between a dozen servers around the world, so the results are representative of a global audience.

This data is by no means comprehensive, but I think it’s a fair indication of the real difference between the services. Media Temple could have been having a bad few days, but my websites seemed to be functioning normally and I can’t recall any service incidents during that period. It’s also possible that WebFaction’s response times aren’t anything special and only seem so when compared with a poorly performing competitor, but either way my sites feel a lot snappier than before.