The Kiwi Web Hosting Company™ Speed Test

The purpose of this page is to provide a base for benchmarking the speed of The Kiwi Web Hosting Company™ server's internet transfer speed and computational speed.

We hope that some day other New Zealand web hosting companies will follow suit, and provide some sort of system by which prospective customers can ascertain the quality of the web host's service.

Transfer Speed Test

For most users, this is the most important test, as this reflects the speed at which your visitors will be able to view the pages on your site, or the rate at which they are able to download larger files, such as photos etc.

Unfortunately, this test is also the most difficult to do accurately. This is because the speed that a file downloads depends on a number of factors, not just our own server's internet connection. The most important other factor is, of course, the speed of your own internet connection. Consequently, if you're on dial-up, this test will have little value, since the speed of your modem will be the real limiting factor in the download speed. Broadband users on the other hand should get a reasonably good indication of our potential throughput.

To try the test, just download the file below by clicking on it. The file is 1105 kilobytes (1.1 MB) in size. As the file downloads, your browser will tell you approximately how fast the file is downloading. Depending on the load on our servers, you should get speeds of between 50 and 100 kb/sec (the server is actually on a non-speedcapped 100 Mbit/sec connection to the internet, and we have clocked speeds of >800 kb/sec between remote servers).
Download 1105kb.zip

Computational Speed Test

This test is really only important if your site performs any intensive computational tasks, such as database queries or site searching features.

The test involves executing a very simple CGI script that performs 2.5 million simple find and replace operations. The source code of the file is available. If you want compare our server's computational speed with that of another, you would have to get them to put the script on their server. Since computational speed can vary considerably from server to server (it depends on both the load on the server and its specifications), we strongly suggest you do this before choosing a web hosting service.

To run the test, just click the link below (it should take about 10 seconds to complete):
Test Computational Speed