We host LOTS of public school websites, and only a couple of our customers seem to complain about site performance, saying that it's taking a LOOONG time to load the home page or other pages.

However, when I check the sites myself, over my home cable internet connection they load great.  I even used Firebug to measure page load times and they are great for me, so I never see the problems that the customer complains about.

I strongly suspect that the problem is on their end...something with the LAN or WAN, but the customer, of course, does not want to hear that the problem is on their end...IT ALWAYS the host's fault....NOT!!!

Question:  Is there some place (3rd party) to check on site performance so we can both be on the same page?  I want to show them that it's not an issue on our end, but I can't prove it from our servers (not unbiased), and they need to be proven that the issue IS on their end since NONE of our other customers on the same server and same connections EVER complain...they all rave about us!

Any hosts or providers run into this problem?  If so, how did you prove to the customer that the problem is NOT on your end?

Try the site yourself: www.glynn.k12.ga.us (public school in GA)...it loads for me in about 3 seconds...anyone else have bad load times with it?

Thanks!

I'm on Comcast cable and it loaded in less than 4 seconds. Not a scientific test, but certainly not slow by any means.

There are any number of web site performance test sites or tools, but few, if any, that are free.  I like to have the end user run http://www.speedtest.net/ to see what their speed is to the server or workstation (you can run it yourself too) to get a baseline of the internet speed.  There are a number of add-ons for Firefox that do a test as well, though again, you need to test on different clients to get a good range.

What you describe is a typical client issue, and a bad DNS setting or a workstation issue such as a caching problem can easily cause this to happen.  I have rarely had a lot of luck in convincing the client their workstation needs to be looked at other than by providing comparison times from several other clients.

Jeff