Alex’s PHP Web Host Comparison

Alex Malen, of the Web Hosting Mind blog which I have reviewed in the past, has finally gotten around to publishing his results on the comparison of PHP performance on different free web hosts. The tests themselves were quite well designed, because the code was the same on all hosts and it was run several times. This means that they are more accurate when it comes to comparing hosts, because you are getting a better representation of the hosts. While his analysis is missing the standard statistical methods, such as comparison of distributions and the standard deviations of the times, we still cannot claim that his conclusion is scientifically correct. But someone looking for the fastest free host probably wouldn’t understand or not care about that, so it is still a comparison worth reading.

The results show that 110mb.com, which I am not really a big fan of, has the fastest hosting with the most space and most bandwidth! I’m not really surprised about it, because 110mb does offer quality hosting, it’s just that I do not like some of their policies. My own web host, Freehostia, came in 4th and was over performed by Alex’s T35 Web Hosting only by a few seconds, even though they would probably tie if we performed a full analysis 😉

I hope that Alex redoes his tests sometimes in the future, so we can change if any of the hosts will improve over time. He is promising that T35 will improve its service in the next few weeks to perform better, and hopefully other hosts will do so too.