Who is the best web provider for hosting websites, blogs and private cloud storage?
This is the question that connect and zafaco addressed in their web hosting 2020 provider check. The German providers Hetzner, Mittwald, Webgo, All-inkl and Host Europe achieve top performance scores and hence a ‘very good’ rating. In mid-table with a ‘good’ rating are Strato, Estugo and GoDaddy. In comparison, big companies such as Ionos and providers Goneo, DomainFactory and Alfahosting ended up at the bottom of the list of this year’s rated providers and are only rated ‘satisfactory’.
At least half of websites in Germany are hosted on relatively slow servers. This is the alarming finding of the web hosting 2020 provider check recently published by connect and zafaco.
The network test experts zafaco extensively tested so-called web hosting packages on behalf of connect from mid-June to mid-July. Private and business customers use package deals from specialist companies to build websites and online shops, create private blogs or set up cloud storage in the Internet. During the course of the test, automated test systems carried out 672,614 individual measurements. Internet connections from 1&1, EWE, M-net, NetCologne, Pyur, Telefónica, Telekom and Vodafone (including Unitymedia) were tested in conjunction with a variety of currently available connection devices. Hence, the test reliably reflects the real life experience of users accessing the Internet in Germany.
Special static test websites were tested, as well as ‘dynamic websites’ created using the Wordpress blog system. The test also focused on the performance of PHP (a script language for more complicated websites) and the execution times of complex database functions on the tested servers.
Very good ratings mainly for national providers
The surprise: very good results were mainly achieved by small and medium-sized providers with headquarters in Germany, i.e. Hetzner, based in Gunzenhausen, Franconia (473 out of 500 points, very good rating), Mittwald, a company based in Espelkamp, North Rhine-Westphalia (466 out of 500 points, very good rating) and the Hamburg web provider Webgo (465 out of 500 points, very good rating). All-inkl from Friedersdorf, Saxony (450 out of 500 points, very good rating) and the Cologne provider Host Europe (433 out of 500 points, very good rating) are also among the top scorers.
Good results were also obtained by Strato (424 out of 500 points, good rating), a relatively large provider with more than two million customers and data centres in Berlin and Karlsruhe, Estugo from Greifswald in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (360 out of 500 points, good rating) and GoDaddy, a globally active provider operating from a Munich subsidiary (375 out of 500 points, good rating).
Relatively slow page loading and/or inadequate server performance led to just a satisfactory result for the following providers: Goneo, based in Minden, East-Westphalia (356 out of 500 points, satisfactory rating), the Ismaning provider DomainFactory (345 out of 500 points, satisfactory rating), Ionos, part of the 1&1 conglomerate (eight million customer contracts, 340 out of 500 points, satisfactory rating) and Alfahosting, a hosting provider based in Halle/Saale (337 out of 500 points, satisfactory rating). Ionos cited its decision to implement redundant data storage as the reason for the poor performance of its dynamic web pages and database. The provider has actively sacrificed database speed to some extent in favour of data security.
More than half of German websites could be faster
According to DENIC, the company that runs the German domain registry, there are about 16.3 million websites in Germany. More than half of them are hosted by providers rated ‘satisfactory’ in the test. (Ionos: approximately eight million customer contracts, DomainFactory: approximately 1.3 million, Alfahosting: approximately 200,000; Goneo did not provide figures).
‘We were surprised to discover that big providers in particular–who are popular among users–deliver a service that can be likened to driving with the handbrake on,’ says Dirk Waasen, publishing director, publisher and connect’s editor-in-chief, commenting on the results. ‘Customers would be misguided to think ‘big is best’ when it comes to choosing a web hosting provider. The best decision-making guidelines here are our independently determined test results.’
Rating does not depend on price: ‘We only tested package deals costing 12 euros or less a month. Promotional prices offered for the first few months to attract new customers were not evaluated,’ explains Christoph Sudhues, managing director of zafaco.
In addition, the contract period was not allowed to exceed 12 months and the monthly price had to include data traffic. ‘The next interesting question is whether the provider’s more expensive tariffs offer a better service,’ says Christoph Sudhues. zafaco will shortly be investigating this in depth as part of further tests.