Last checked: 2026-10-27 — verify pricing/features on vendor sites before buying

How We Test Hosting Latency (Reproducible Checklist)

Single “42 ms” screenshots are marketing. Use this checklist to produce notes you can defend. HostBench articles should link here whenever they mention performance.

Before you measure

Record: date/time (with timezone), your city/network type (home/office/mobile), and provider region.
Use a stable URL (avoid first-deploy cold caches when comparing warm performance).
Disable browser extensions; prefer CLI for apples-to-apples.

Commands to run

1) DNS resolve

dig +short example.com
# or
nslookup example.com

2) TLS + TTFB style timings with curl (curl %{time_*} variables)

curl -o /dev/null -s -w "namelookup:%{time_namelookup} connect:%{time_connect} tls:%{time_appconnect} ttfb:%{time_starttransfer} total:%{time_total}\n" https://example.com/

3) Repeat five times and record the median TTFB

for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do
  curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n" https://example.com/
done

Copy the commands into a shell from your measurement region. Log date, network, and cold vs warm.

What to publish

Publish	Do not publish
Method, region, n=5 median/range, date	“Fastest host in the world” without method
Cold vs warm noted separately	One cherry-picked best trial
Confounds (VPN, Wi-Fi, CPU steal)	Fake SLA or uptime % you did not monitor

VPS extras

From the VPS: curl a known file on the same provider’s object storage vs a third-party CDN.
Note CPU type (shared vs dedicated) and neighbor noise if visible.
Retest after enabling a CDN in front of the origin.

Method hub: How we benchmark.

Last checked: 2026-10-27. This page intentionally has no affiliate CTA.