I'm strongly considering a new host, and I'm pretty happy with the plan they offer and customer service I've received. They are a fairly small hosting company associated with a design/network company and hosting around a hundred or so sites according to their client list. They report excellent uptime, but haven't really given any performance stats. The client sites seem to load quickly, but I can't really tell the file size. I also want to know about MYSQL response, as my sites use wordpress. Are there some tests I can run externally, to verify short-term uptime (say for 72-hours) and compare server response time to a few pings? I just want to be sure my move will improve these. Are there any online test sites you use for this?
We use just-ping for pings to verify response time as it does the job from multiple locations. You can use a uptime monitor for uptime stats, but most of these are not free. If they are free, then they aren't reliable.
This depends on the ISP the server is on, and the location as well. However, the above results are fine if you don't need to run latency-intensive services.
I'm sorry, unfamiliar term: latency-intensive? Like lots of crons and so forth? I mostly want my Wordpress blogs to load faster and have more reliable crawls. The server is in Colorado, USA, if that helps. I tested the host's own domain. May I presume these results are similar to what my sites would show on this server?
No. like Gaming etc. If you're hosting website, that is not an issue. Also, a server;'s performance is not just the speed, its CPU/Memory capability as well. You can get faster transfer speeds if you optimize the server to remove any features which are not going to be used.
There is a number of free tools to test a server performance from different approaches at his site www. network-tools.com