BigdomainhostWhat the number means
Latency is the time a request takes to reach a server and for the first byte of the answer to come back. It is separate from bandwidth: a fast connection to a far-away server still waits for every round trip.
A web page is not one request. The HTML, stylesheets, scripts, fonts and images add up to dozens, and many of them wait on each other. So a 250 ms round trip to a US server is not a quarter-second delay; it is a quarter-second paid several times over before the page is usable.
| Median | What it feels like |
|---|---|
| Under 30 ms | Excellent. Pages, admin panels and SSH feel local. |
| 30–80 ms | Good for websites. Noticeable in RDP and game servers. |
| 80–150 ms | Usable, but pages feel slower than they should, especially on mobile. |
| Over 150 ms | Your visitors are paying for distance on every request. Host closer to them. |
How the test works
Your browser requests a tiny file from each server: ours returns two bytes, the AWS endpoints return a one-line health check. Responses are never cached. The first request to each server is a warm-up and is not counted, because it also pays for the DNS lookup, TCP handshake and TLS setup. The next ten are timed and the median is shown, so one slow request does not skew the result.
A browser cannot send a true ICMP ping, so this measures an HTTPS round trip instead. It reads a few milliseconds higher than ping from the same machine. For a terminal check of the same server, run:
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{time_connect}s connect, %{time_starttransfer}s first byte\n" https://bom1.bigdomainhost.com/ping.txtWhy your result might be higher than expected
- Wi-Fi and mobile data add 5–40 ms over a wired connection, more on a congested tower.
- VPNs route you through the VPN's server first. A VPN exit in Singapore makes Mumbai look like Singapore.
- Your ISP's routing sometimes sends Indian traffic out of the country and back. If our server reads much higher than AWS Mumbai, tell us your ISP and city; that is a routing problem we can report.
What to do with the result
If most of your visitors are in India, the difference between Mumbai and Singapore or the US is the difference you see in the table, paid on every request. Our locations page lists typical latency from each major Indian city, and KVM VPS and cPanel hosting plans run in Mumbai today. Moving an existing site is free and we do it: see how a migration works.