Leaderboard Network Quality

Our database lists prices and features but does little to describe how well the providers connect themselves to the internet. This new section shows ping times from locations around the world to the best providers in our database - we have not done this for all of them as it's a lot of work! However, if you want to do your own analysis, simply enter an IP into http://just-ping.com.

We have standardised the graphs around New York (specifically Interserver) as that remains the single best place in the world to locate an internet server. We have tried to ensure that these graphs are accurate, but network topologies do change over time.

How to interpret the graphs

We'll take one example: let us compare OVH with Swiftway. The servers for both are located in Central Europe and so the profiles (or shape) of the graphs are very similar. However, OVH consistently has 50-70ms more lag on access to its servers from around the world - no matter where you are excepting oddly enough Ireland where OVH shines, though Swiftway are particularly badly connected to Poland. Of course an extra 50-70ms makes little difference to European users when the overall ping times are so low anyway, but it's rather more important for Australian users.

In the end what really matters is the tradeoff between speed for your target usership and other features: if your audience is global, one can accept worse hardware if the global connectivity is better. If on the other hand your audience is very country specific then the tradeoff is different.