According to multiple reports, Chrome may show users a warning if your site is slow, before they click your link. This might discourage some users from sites that are slow loading.
Many of the free web hosts out there are very slow. Some free web hosts have ads, which are out of your control, and will slow down your site. Through our testing, we’ve come up with a list of what we think are the best free web hosts.
We already covered an article about what the top 7 fastest fastest hosts globally overall are, but now we thought we’d find out which companies are fastest in the USA. Here is where we see the biggest difference!
To us, the most relevant factor is the speeds in the US, since that’s where the majority of our customers are. Additionally, the hosts are based out of the US and the further you get from a host the more external factors come into play. To keep the results purest, we’re focusing on the US speeds. Since speeds can be different at different locations across the US, we took an average between the East Coast speed and the West Cost speed.
Fastest Web Hosting speed test results for the average USA server response time (in milliseconds)
AccelerHosting takes the cake for it’s best server response time of 2 miliseconds average between US East and US West zones.
Here are the list of hosts ordered by their US average response times:
There was a larger gap than we thought between the fastest host (which was AccelerHosting) and the rest. AccelerHosting’s first place score with it’s US Average being 2 ms while the second place (GreenGeeks) was more than 22ms slower. The rest of the other scores are a bit closer to each other, with them being about 5-6ms apart from each other.
We got our result data for this test from Bitcatcha, who says that “Your webpage load time depends on several factors, including its code, caching, content delivery system and more. The response time of your web hosting depends on the quality of its network and hardware.” It’s important to note that while AccelerHosting was fastest overall, both SiteGround and GreenGeeks had a faster score for a single side of the US, but only by a small margin (1ms). Based on this it would seem that AccelerHosting is at some kind of a hub location that has equally fast connection with both sides of the US. If you’re focused on just a single side of the US, it might make sense to go for the second or third rank contenders, but if you’re looking for the fastest overall, AccelerHosting seems to be the clear winner.
Since AccelerHosting’s scores weren’t on Bitcatcha’s main list of their reviewed fastest, even though they show as the fastest overall in the US, we’re posting a link to the speed checker result (so you can see it for yourself, though we’re not sure how long these results are kept on their server) and the screenshot of the Bitcatcha scores here:
Screenshot of the Bitcatcha Server Speed Checker scores for AccelerHosting.com
You might think that a few milliseconds doesn’t matter so much, but this time will add up and compound when one request depends on another. First your page HTML has to be retrieved before anything else, which then references some of your other files (CSS, images, etc), but then some of those other files may then yet reference even further more files (such as a CSS file referencing other image files). Each call adds additional latency. It all adds up and can affect your site speed more than what it might seem on the surface! That’s why we’re also planning on doing Google PageSpeed test to see how they all stack up cumulatively.
For reference here is the full list of the fastest scores globally, as well as the US average, as measured by Bitcatcha:
We got all this data from Bitcatcha, though we’ve added the “US Average” column (by averaging the US West and US East columns). If you’re interested in seeing the global average, you’ll want to checkout global Fastest Web Hosting speed comparison. If you want to check the scores of your current host, head over to Bitcatcha’s report page.
We hope this comparison has been helpful in evaluating the speed of different hosts, and that it helps you in your journey to find the fastest web hosting in the United States of America!
If you find a faster host in the US, please drop us a line in our comments and we’ll try to add it. Thank you!
Since Google now includes page speed as a ranking factor in search results, web hosting speed is a big deal. When we were searching for the fastest web hosting, we were surprised that the top result for that search term didn’t include some of the fastest hosts! The site we found which purports to test speed of different hosts only includes the top 6, but we found a host that appears to beat them all for the fastest overall scores in the US, so we’re listing the top 7 fastest web hosts.
Table of Contents
Ranking Results
Fastest Web Hosting Speed Test Results average server response time in milliseconds (smaller numbers are better)
For this comparison we’ve taken an average of 8 different locations around the world (7 different countries with 2 in the USA). We’re ranking them based on their average response time based from from all these locations combined. Again, similar to our USA only comparison, AccelerHosting got the best score and seems to be a large margin in the lead being close to 40ms ahead of it’s closest competitor. AccelerHosting seems to be the clear winner here, unless you’re only interested in localized speed for a specific area, in which case you might look to the other contenders.
Global Averages
Here are the list of hosts ordered by their global average response times:
Since AccelerHosting’s scores weren’t on Bitcatcha’s main list of the fastest reviewed sites, even though they show as the fastest overall in the US, we’re posting a link to the speed checker result (though we’re not sure how long these results are kept on their server) and the screenshot of the Bitcatcha scores here:
AccelerHosting’s results for Bitcatcha’s Server Speed Checker
You might think that a few milliseconds doesn’t matter so much, but this time will add up and compound when one request depends on another. First your page HTML has to be retrieved before anything else, which then references some of your other files (CSS, images, etc), but then some of those other files may then yet reference even further more files (such as a CSS file referencing other image files). Each call adds additional latency. It all adds up and can affect your site speed more than what it might seem on the surface! That’s why we’re also planning on doing Google PageSpeed test to see how they all stack up cumulatively.
The Full Data
For reference here is the full list of scores along with their global average:
The main numbers we looked at for our graph were there worldwide average for all the locations together, though if you’re more interested in only specific areas you can see the breakdown above. For those interested primarily in the US markets, we’ve done a separate review of the US scores. If you want to check the scores of your current host, head over to Bitcatcha’s report page, which is where we got all of the data for this report.
Conclusion
We hope this comparison has been helpful in evaluating the speed of different hosts, and that it helps you in your journey to find the fastest web hosting! In the future we’ll be looking at other scores such as GTmetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Google is of course the most widely used search engine in the world, so it would make sense to trust their scores. Stay tuned for more tests and rankings coming soon!
If you find a faster host, please drop us a line in our comments and we’ll try to add it. Thank you!