So get this, for a while now (1.5 years) I've noted that one of the my bigger sites is exceptionally slow compared to the competition. I've done some ping test and submitted them to my host. They're response was my site was doing fine, responded fine, responded fast even, and that I shouldn't worry. I of course knew otherwise, the web site loaded slower than the competition, albeit I had different programs running (a heavy perl based forum), but still I wasn't pleased.

I knew my packet loss was really low, so that was good, but I still wasn't happy with the speed. What I needed was some third-party to independently corroborate my hunch feelings. Well I know there are other tools out there, benchmark tests between servers and such, but when Google released their crawl rate speeds and averages I was happy to compare some results.

Admittedly, the web sites I'm about to compare are not equal, so this may skew results, however, these are on average results provided by Google Webmaster Tools so I should be able to see some differences/similarities. So let's play a little game, I'm going to list features of each web site with corresponding screenshot of the Google Webmaster Tools crawl rate graph. You're job is to determine which server it's from.

I'm going to show you five different graphs. 2 are on the same server while the other 3 are on different severs with completely different companies (so 4 different hosts all together.) All crawl time numbers I give you are in milliseconds and will follow these categories: Max crawl time --- average crawl time --- minimum crawl time.

Web Site #1

• Largest site of the 5 running perl based forum. 30 000+ unique a month.
• 1175-1034-885

Web Site #2

• Small site running perl based forum. 300 unique a month, most to WordPress blog.
• 1205-863-710

Web Site #3

• Small web site with WordPress blog, about 750 uniques a month.
• 761-340-94

Web Site #4

• Forum, blog, and picture gallery, all PHP driven. About 600 uniques a month.
• 5391-1190-467

Web Site #5

• Tiny web site with static pages, about 100 uniques a month.
• 278-178-59

So can we make any inference based on crawl rate and host speeds/service? Let's see how you do, pick which web sites are on different hosts and which two are with the same host. The results will be posted in a few days. Good luck!

If you don't have a Google Webmasters account be sure to visit their page and join. If you have a Gmail or Adwords account then you can use the same login information.