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.

Speed increase diagram

Faster is Always Better!

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.


What we can do

At ImHosted.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 ImHosted.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

Accelerated by MOD_GZIP

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 ImHosted.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.


Benefits of Cache & HTTP Compression.

  1. Improves site loading speed
  2. Higher transaction rate
  3. More stability for your hosted site (reduces system and CPU load)
  4. Run more server side scripts, faster (PHP/CGI)
  5. Up to 300% performance boost on script executions
  6. 150%-160% performance gain on static/dynamic content
  7. Bandwidth is conserved


View a benchmark report on ZendCache™ (Adobe Acrobat required *.pdf)
View a screenshot of the ImHosted :: cache control room