Quite a while ago I setup an account at mon.itor.us and recently I was looking at the various stats that they are producing, not too bad for a freebie 🙂

Here’s an example of the recent http response times for my website.

As you can see in the graph above, from the monitoring stations in Austria, Germany and USA the response times are a bit all over the place and not very consistent across the day.

Looking at the graph for the previous day we can see a few hour gap of no response at all, only timeouts. Ahh don’t we all just love our Dreamhost accounts 🙂

I setup another monitor to check http performance of one of my VPS machines, this one tested is in Germany, in the graph below you can see that the http response times are a lot more consistent across the day.

So I then moved my personal site to a server locally here in Australia, and even though it’s a lot further away from the monitoring stations the results are very consistent across the day.

I’m not sure if I’ll leave my site here in AU in the long term and I have started thinking about the other domains I have in my Dreamhost account.

In summary, this confirms that while Dreamhost are “great value” in many regards, if you spend a bit more money you’ll probably get a lot better performance.

Maybe I’ll shift all my sites to one of my VPS’s in Europe or USA where the performance of dedicated resources will be a lot better than what you might get on Dreamhost shared hosting.

Then again I got shared hosting so I didn’t have to worry about maintaining a server and the associated software, my catch 22.