Use servers overseas or in Australia?

We have found that from Newcastle NSW to Brisbane and Newcastle to Sydney are both the same speed. But that to a website hosted in Florida USA the difference was 0.25 seconds.

This can be measured in the windows command box by typing “ping [domain name]” for each destination website.

That is not a large difference but where a web page is made up of many files including CSS, JavaScript, Images and included header and footer files they can all add to loading time.

The speed of a website loading can be measured at http://tools.pingdom.com
When comparing two websites enter each one straight after the other and in the settings choose “Melbourne” for each.

This speed test counts all the files making up the web page including CSS, JavaScript, images, included headers and footers, etc. The speed will also be affected by the number of other websites on the same server. On Platypus dedicated servers there are only a few hundred on each, while on the large company hosting servers there may be thousands sharing the server.

But when comparing two websites, each will contain a different number of Kilobytes, so dived the time in milliseconds by the number of Kilobytes to get the comparable speed per Kilobyte.