the black bar indicates the time after I made the changes to the DNS records for m0unds.net, to point them to superb. you’ll likely notice something…strange. yes, that says 4,093 milliseconds. that 4 seconds for a flat file with a couple kb of text and a single image to load. compare this to the current host (smaller numbers) which averaged 200ms (1/5th of one second) to load the same content.

grid/cloud stuff is interesting in part because storage is generally not actually part of the system that reads from it. so, despite the fact that the webservers may very well be extremely fast, if i/o is slow, the hosted sites will be slow. i submitted a ticket to ask tech support about the issue, and i’m anxious to see what they tell me. it’s hard to explain away something as a fluke when there are hard numbers backing it up.

*edit* – so it looks like superb’s awesome support folks strike again. after submitting my ticket with the screenshots from pingdom, including an hourly breakdown, one of their systems engineers was assigned the ticket. a few hours later, i received a maintenance email from superb’s NOC, and 5 minutes of downtime, followed by another email from the engineer indicating they isolated and corrected the problem system-wide. sure enough:

the black line indicates when the configuration change occurred.

if you’re looking for a webhost, i’d totally recommend superb.net – their pricing, support and speeds are great.