Performance Hosting

My team and I spend a lot of time talking about website performance. I've been doing a lot of research on ways to measure and improve website performance.

Globat's entire dev team now runs YSlow. It is based off of the FireBug Firefox extension. It gives us an objective view of how our services are performing as well as getting into the real opportunities for increasing our customers' website performance.

One of the ways we are investigating increasing performance is using reverse caching techniques at the edge of our network to cache frequently accessed files. We're seeing initial tests with cache hits as high as 75% for certain sites. This cuts down latency and speeds up delivery of websites to the visitors of our customers websites. I'm seeing performance gains as higher than 100%. For example, a site which takes 3.84 seconds to load (which has 30 jpeg thumbnails) cuts down to 1.28 seconds - with out any optimization of the client's site.

As our front end test progress, I look forward to bringing this speed to our customer base. We're on the cutting edge of shared hosting and delivery speed is on the front of our agenda.


-Chris Ueland / President, Globat.com