There are many factors that contribute to this fact, however, the most important ones are listed below.

1) While many of our competitors have followed our lead and now offer only Dell PowerEdge servers, many still do not spend the money necessary to build high performance servers. For example, our shared web servers typically have 4GB of system RAM installed on them and support between 75 and 200 customers web sites, depending upon specific performance criteria.

For a detailed report on the impact of system RAM on web server performance, please visit Crucial's web site and read VeriTest's report on RAM impact on web servers.

Be careful of claims from companies running Windows 2003 and claiming to have more than 2GB of RAM in their web servers. If they are running the Web Edition, which most companies use, there is a 2GB limitation by the operating system. Only Windows 2003 standard edition supports 4GB of system RAM. See Microsoft's web site for details.

2) Hard disk configuration is also extremely important. At ASPwebhosting.com, we configure our servers with separate hardware for OS and DATA partitions and we do not use NAS to store your web site across slow network connections. First, we use only DELL PowerEdge Expandable Raid Controllers (Hardware RAID) on our Dell PowerEdge servers. Secondly, we configure separate hardware containers for the OS and the web site data using high performance 15K Seagate SCSI's. Eliminating bottlenecks by separating OS and DATA allows the server to perform simultaneous data transactions for both the OS and your web site and provides a higher level of reliability by eliminating the possibility of an OS failure from corrupting the disk drives that house your data. How many times have you experienced a failure of Windows due to a corruption of a Windows/System32 file that cause you to lose your data? Not at ASPwebhosting.com. We separate our OS from your DATA on physically separate RAID systems on each server.

While network connections are fine for retrieving data from a SQL Server server it does not provide fast efficient file services for web sites.
Even using GigE connections does not provide the performance of a hardware RAID SCSI system directly attached to the web server. Placing SQL Server services on a remote server attached to high performance Cisco switches DOES, however, increase the speed of your data lookups significantly over crowded web servers sharing server resources with SQL Server.

3) We do not run any services from virtual RAM. This is one of the single most important factors concerning web hosting. Most of our competitors load so many sites on a server that they quickly exhaust all of the system RAM causing web pages to be served from virtual RAM...or disk space. This causes significant bottlenecks resulting in delays serving your web pages.

At ASPwebhosting.com, we do stop adding applications to servers when the physical RAM use reaches 80% of system capacity. If we have a single customer using more than a  fair share of system RAM, we notify that customer, provide them suggestions how to reduce their RAM use and in extreme cases, we move the customers site off the server. Because we have proprietary system monitors installed on all our servers, we know about RAM problems before our customers. This enables us to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to resolving performance issues. Typically, a customer never notices a performance issue because we have the issue resolved before it impacts the performance of their site.

4) Network configuration is another important area of concern. Most hosting companies have a single network serving their customers. At ASPwebhosting.com, we utilize multiple redundant Cisco networks that significantly improve performance for web hosting services. Not only do we provide a secure DMZ zone for web servers, mail servers and such, we also provide a secure private network for serving SQL Server data and system monitoring. When connecting your application to your database, performance is crucial. You cannot afford to have your application waiting on its data due to network delays caused by email and other non mission critical data transfers consuming your bandwidth.

In addition to significant performance benefits, our network design contributes to enhanced system monitoring and security. Our monitoring systems provide comprehensive real-time analysis of our IP network, protocol traffic, NT services and general system health, including memory utilization,  disk space availability and processor performance. These networks are secured using a combination of Microsoft and Cisco technologies and were designed by one of NASA's leading systems engineers.