The advancement of modern technology, faster CPUs, larger RAM in smaller form factors, and other hardware and tools can create a faster web hosting service and experience for your website and your visitors. Unfortunately, there is not a single item that grants faster web hosting speeds, website page speed, or server speed. Rather it is a series of items working in conjunction with one another which creates faster web hosting services.

While SSDs do offer speed advantages, as well as other advantages, they only play a small part in creating a faster web hosting service experience.

Benefits of SSD-based Hosting
Most of the web hosting companies continue to use both HDD and SSD drives due to a few factors. InMotion Hosting no longer offers website hosting services with HDD for several reasons. SSD based web hosting services offers several features that directly benefit the end-user such as high transfer speed, performance, and reliability. SSD based hosting is also faster than HDD because the SSD can access information extremely quickly. Sometimes up to 100X faster than an HDD drive. With low power needs the SSDs do not require as much power to run due to no moving parts. Allowing end-users to access information quickly and more reliably.

SSDs also known as solid-state drives, is a storage device that stores non-volatile information through solid-state memory or flash memory. SSDs are more reliable based on having no moving parts. Typical plate-based hard drives (HDD) contain spinning plates, arms and other moving parts to access your information. These moving parts have a strong tendency to break or become unresponsive due to mechanical failure. The result can be server outages, loss of data, and critical website downtime which would require a support team.

InMotion Hosting SSD Based Hosting
All of our server hardware and web hosting services now offer SSD based hosting due to the speed, security, and reliability of this hardware. We moved to SSD based servers in accordance with our company mantra – web hosting plans with the speed, security, and reliability our customers need to grow their business.

Get the fastest web hosting speed and verify it using a few different methods. Check our network ping times. Simply open your command prompt and place an IP address on the command line.

Los Angeles, US: 192.249.115.39
Washington D.C., US: 23.235.194.255

Check your website availability and response time with the help of several free online tools. Services such as Pingdom, Dotcom Tools, and several others offer free tools to test your website hosting speeds.

Your website and hosting speeds are important. Why are they so important? Your visitors expect a fast online experience. Regardless of desktop or mobile the expectations of your visitors are high. Slow loading page speeds and other speed-related issues lead to several issues. Issues can include visitors’ lack of trust in your website, low search engine rankings, and low conversions. As the internet grows, the competition gets more and more fierce and attention spans of consumers grow shorter. A fast website is an essential part of your business.

A hyperfast website is obviously essential. How fast does your website need to be serving pages to your visitors? The response time guide below will outline the times your website should strive in order to better convert and serve your website pages.

• 1 second or less = Superstar
• 1-3 seconds = Above Average
• 3-7 seconds = Average
• 7 or more seconds = extremely poor

If your website response time is in the average or below category, you likely need to improve several areas of your website as well as examine your current web hosting services.

Below are a few tips that can help you update the load speeds and response times of your website.

1. Fix all of your website errors.
Fixing broken links, broken pages, and other items can greatly improve the load speeds of your site. These broken items lead your visitors to broken pages, dead ends, and more. Add 301 redirects to any permalinks that have changed as well as resubmit your XML sitemap to the search engines to get your website crawled again.

2. Optimize your images.
Add your images to a content delivery network (CDN) or compress them with one of many plugins. Make sure they are not too large to be loaded quickly. The compression and clarity of the images are key. Also, add keywords to your images

3. Leverage your data center, server location, and browser caching for a fast website.
With select InMotion Hosting web hosting services you can choose your data center. Your choice of data center and server location can provide you with better hosting speeds, load speeds and response times. For browser caching, investigate and update files that do not change often or need to be cached for fast web response time. These items can include your logo, icons, images, etc.

4. Check your current web hosting services.
Your business may be on a plan that it has outgrown or you may need a new web hosting company entirely. With InMotion Hosting you can chat with any of our support team experts and technicians to answer any questions you may have about data centers, server locations, web hosting services, load speeds, hosting speeds, or even VPS hosting.

Click here to chat now and let us help you choose a website hosting plan that is right for your business.

At InMotion Hosting we are a web hosting company that is obsessed with hosting speeds. We are dedicated to helping you succeed and grow your business and website with the fastest web hosting speeds in the industry. Since we are experts in fast web hosting we have put together a few tips to consider for making your web applications run even faster.

1. Reduce the number of HTTP requests and redirects.
Minimizing the number DNS or domain name system lookups is critical for improving front end performance. When your visitors type in your website URL into the browser window, your browser takes your website address (URL) and performs a lookup to find the mapped IP address in the DNS.

It takes around 22-120 milliseconds for the browser to complete a DNS lookup and receive the response back from the DNS resolver. While this is an extremely short amount of time for the DNS to be resolved, multiple requests to your server location or website address begin to multiply. With multiple visitors loading the website each time they visit will extend your load time. The result – the more visitors the slower your website page speed loads. Multiply this with every single asset that you want or need to load and it further compounds the issue of load speed and time. Your high traffic website response time is now slow for your new and returning visitors.

You can resolve the slow load issues quickly with the help of a content delivery network (CDN). Content Delivery Networks, like Cloudflare or Akamai, are as popular as they are crucial for performance gains and hosting speeds. If your app only has to resolve a single hostname to discover and load all of your assets, your visitors will experience the fastest web hosting as a result.

InMotion Hosting offers a free CDN with select WordPress hosting plans.

2. Reduce the number of images your site needs for the initial page load.
Any images that are not placed on your CDN will need to be compressed so your files are smaller and more lightweight for better response times. You can use free and paid encoders including MozJPEG, Webp, Svgo, and many more for lossless or lossy image compression.

Once you have compressed the images make sure to add the “image source set” tag or “picture element” tag to your images in the code of your website. These tags ensure the use of different pixel densities based on different device characteristics such as a mobile phone or tablet. If you are using WordPress you can use several plugins.

If you use the “picture element” tag, also make sure that you use an image tag as well in case the picture element isn’t fully supported by certain browsers.

3. Prioritize the critical rendering path.
The render tree is composed of the DOM tree and CSSOM tree. Upon page load, after traversing the DOM the CSSOM styles that go with associated nodes are compiled together to create the render tree. Prioritizing only those HTML elements and their associated styles for the initial page load is important to maintaining an optimal front end-user experience. You hear this referred to often with the misnomer of “prioritizing above-the-fold”. This practice has its roots in print media. After all, in print prioritizing only what would be seen first is critical. However, with web pages, the term “above the fold” became the terminology that was associated with the website information seen before the screen usable space ended.

Keep in mind that websites are fluid and responsive by nature and you should consider all devices and device orientations to ensure layouts promote optimal user experience on your website.