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.
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.
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
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.
- Improves site loading speed
- Higher transaction rate
- More stability for your hosted site (reduces system and CPU
load)
- Run more server side scripts, faster (PHP/CGI)
- Up to 300% performance boost on script executions
- 150%-160% performance gain on static/dynamic content
- Bandwidth is conserved
View a benchmark
report on ZendCache™ (Adobe Acrobat required *.pdf)
View a
screenshot of the ImHosted :: cache control room 
