I've been pinging my own Hostony site and a few others. The average round trips are pretty steady at around 50 milliseconds. I need to test a few more places but at the moment that looks to be on the slow side of acceptable. Google and Yahoo, for instance, rarely clock in slower than 12ms. I realize a discount house like Hostony won't be able to match vast server farms like Google's, but then again they don't have to deal with massive concurrent users like Google. Is 50ms about as good as can be expected? Am I correct in thinking averaged ICMP response is directly indicative of typical website response?

50 milliseconds is a good number.
An averaged ICMP response depends on how far is the server from you.
Typical website response is almost independent from ICMP response latency.

I use a speedtest to check hosts that claims to use multiple locations to account for server distance. What I find is that Hostony kicks the butt of just about everybody else (including the featured hosts who buy advertising there)

Check it out, I think you will be pleasantly surprised

Speedtest

Try it a few times to get a good sense of averages; also try other sites or hosts to compare it.

My need for speed was in the end the deciding factor when I chose Hostony, in practice, I have been very pleased. My sites run in reality much faster on their servers than with other hosts I have tried.

Sorry to be a post pest, but I love tools and sharing them, my other job is as a woodworker.

In fact google has servers at the same datacenter our servers are located.

The reason you have 12 ms for google is because they have their servers in many datacenters around the globe and when you ping google you are actually pinging their nearest server.

Ping times below 800-900ms are not noticable for web pages. Sattelite providers have ping times at 600-1500 ms and pages are load damn fast.

The only area where ping times matter are internet phones, most online games and other highly interactive services.

Thanks for the answers Vanya, Dragon and Serge. I guess 50ms is pretty damn good. I'm not sure I agree with Vanya's statement that ICMP response has almost nothing to do with website response. It's true that web page load times are affected by many factors other than network speed, especially if content is being pulled from a database. But if servers are sluggish in returning ICMP requests they will be sluggish in the simple return of HTTP requests-- any other website delay will be in addition to that... I'm pinging from NJ, right next to Manhattan. So Google's advantage, mentioned by Serge, in having servers in many global locations shouldn't come into play here. The Google servers handling my pings are probably in the same datacenter with the Hostony servers handling my pings. For some reason the Hostony servers are putting requests into a little longer queue than are the Google servers, most likely related to the Apache config settings. Either that or the Google servers have massive memory that can shuttle all queued requests faster, or there are more Google than Hostony servers in this datacenter and they split up the traffic so each request is answered faster... Even so, 50ms is probably quite a bit better than most other webhosting companies.

Pages are usually been returned slowly by server when the http server is not fast enough(e.g. can't handle many requests on cgi pages).