Hey i currently have dedicated server at ScarabWeb but in not happy with my hosting speed, i checked google webmasters speed benchmakrs and asked some friends in the USA and they reported my website PornBuddy.com has slow. Is there any host that can provide a better service? do i need a better server? ServerLoft? HostGator? Are those better? How should i test the hosts? Ping? Tracert?
at the moment its a xeon with 1gb of ram... 2 disks would be nice too and a 100mbps connection other things i would like would be off server backups, serverloft has that i think... and off the server restart.. at scarabweb the server crashed 1 day and they took 4 hours to restart it... but the main thing would be speed in connection and server.. and from what i see HostGator only offers 20mbps?
It also depends on your budget for the project. check out the "buy sell or trade" section of this forum to get an idea of what other providers are charging. Yes, you can check the other host's network speed using ping or traceroute. Remember to do those tests from locations near where your site visitors are (traceroute.org is a good tool for that)
If you are not satisfied with the speed you need pay more attention to the network providers of certain web hosts. That could be they use the same network providers.
well you need to optimize your site if you site is Image and video. If you optimize the server, like RAM allocation to Input/output operation because image and video site require more RAM and Bandwidth than the normal sites, so you need to change the general setting. I think here lot of Linux guys there you can help you in this. If you just change your server without tuning the server even in new server you may experience thesame problem. And then while sending to client system there is a php option to compress and send data. These are all small small thing but overall affect your system.