Need to benchmark your website?

I ran into this issue after suggesting clients to use godaddy.com for the longest time. I honestly feel bad now that in an effort to ‘save a buck’ I funneled clients to this giant of a company to only find months later poor customer support and a web hosting setup starved of any resources they might need.

In one particular case, I bench marked load times for a simple PHP web page at well over ~15 seconds!

I contacted support, they sent me useless information how to increase PHP performance (a tactic usually used to sling the blame at the user).  I provided back to them statistics from benchmarking my site, compared to their main page.

So godaddy, replied stating that I should upgrade my hosting to their new grid-something-or-other hosting, because I was a high usage ‘site’.  Right… this customer had a site that had a very small following (25-50 users a day).

Anyway, if you are in the same boat, and you might need to inform your web host (hopefully not godaddy, they won’t do anything) regarding slower than expected response times.  Check out http://webwait.com/

Webwait allows you to quickly and easily add sites to benchmark, and do multiple calls to get an average time rather than just one single test.