Recently I wrote about the monitoring services from mon.itor.us that I use.

As I shifted the last of my sites from Dreamhost to a VPS I was wondering about some of the values I was seeing. For example here’s a fairly normal day in the life of a wordpress site hosted at Dreamhost.

Lots of spikes all over the place, fairly average huh? What was weird was that a different site hosted on the same server wasn’t as bad, although still a bit average.

Looking into a bit more I wondered if it was because the site above was a database intensive site, driven by WordPress CMS. Dreamhosts’ mysql driven sites have always been dog slow compared to everywhere else I’ve hosted, so that would make sense.

I dropped a note to the guys at mon.itor.us just to confirm what is being measured in the http test. I received a prompt reply which confirmed that the http test measures the time taken to receive the http header, not the loading of the page as such.

So how does the mon.itor.us http response measurement look for the same site now it’s on a small VPS? Take a look below…

Waaay better on average over the day. The mysql driven sites especially feel faster on my VPS as compared with the Dreamhost shared account, mon.itor.us just confirmed the “feeling”.