A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

Hosting provider

A service provider that 

manages the server used 

to host an organisation 

website and its 

connection to the Internet 

backbones.

Dial-up connection

Access to the Internet 

via phone lines using 

analogue modems.

Broadband 

connection

Access to the Internet via 

phone lines using a digital 

data transfer mechanism.

M03_CHAF6542_06_SE_C03.indd   103

7/22/14   1:37 AM

---

104

Part 1  Introduction

In 2010 Google introduced speed as a signal into its ranking algorithm, effectively penalis-

ing slower sites by positioning them lower in its listings. The announcement suggested that 

this would only affect 1% of sites (Google, 2010). The announcement also summarised more 

recent research from Akamai which suggested that less than 2 seconds was now an accept-

able download speed for e-commerce site users. With Google taking page download speed 

into account when ranking some particularly slow sites, it’s worth comparing your ‘page 

weight’ or bloat compared to other sites. The average page size is 320 Kb according to this 

compilation: http://code.google.com/speed/articles/web-metrics.html.

Box 3.4

How long before you become impatient?

Usability specialist Jakob Nielsen noted (Nielsen, 1994) that the basic advice for 

response times for  human–  computer interaction has been about the same for 30 years.

He describes these requirements for response:

● 

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting 

instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display 

the result.

● 

1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, 

even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is neces-

sary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose 

the feeling of operating directly on the data.

● 

10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focussed on the dia-

logue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for 

the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the com-

puter expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the 

response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to 

expect.

Speed of access to services is determined by both the speed of the server and the speed of 

the network connection to the server. The speed of the site governs how fast the response 

is to a request for information from the  end-  user. This will be dependent on the speed of 

the server machine on which the website is hosted and how quickly the server processes the 

information. If there are only a small number of users accessing information on the server, 

then there will not be a noticeable delay on requests for pages. If, however, there are thou-

sands of users requesting information at the same time then there may be a delay and it is 

important that the combination of web server software and hardware can cope. Web server 

software will not greatly affect the speed at which requests are answered. The speed of the 

server is mainly controlled by the amount of primary storage (for example, 1024 Mb RAM 

is faster than 512 Mb RAM) and the speed of the magnetic storage (hard disk). Many of the 

 search-  engine websites now store all their index data in RAM since this is faster than reading 

data from the hard disk. Companies will pay ISPs according to the capabilities of the server.

An important aspect of hosting selection is whether the server is