Ping is one of the most well-known and easy-to-use computer network tools. Its basic application is to test the availability of hosts across an IP network. The ping tool was written by Mike Muuss way back in December 1983. Its practical use and reliability were undeniable until 2003, when a lot of internet service providers began filtering ICMP ping requests due to growing thread from internet worms and basic DDoS attacks. Nearly 3 decades later, ping stands tall, providing common computer users, webmasters, and network administrators with valuable information.

Check your network adapter

Common users can use ping from their local machine to check if their LAN, WLAN card is enabled and working by simply pinging itself. The command will look something very similar to this:

Your online presence can easily depend on you answering the question - where to host my site? You will probably do just fine with most hosting providers, or in other words - average.  Average is OK, but we can go one step further and place a solid bedrock for your online business.

Where are your visitors?

Think about where your audience is? It would be best if you made your website as easy as possible to reach by finding hosting with good access, quick to reach, and able to load website pages fast. It is good to get a local provider if you target a local group of people, and likewise, it's good to have remote hosting should you be targeting a remote location.

The response time of a webpage is the time elapsed from the moment the user requests a URL, until the request page is fully displayed. This process can be separated in to 3 logical units - transmission, processing and rendering.

• Transmission consists of the time to transmit the user's request and receive response from the server.
• Processing is the part of the operation where the server has to process the request and generate the response.
• Rendering is client side operation and consists of the time needed by the client machine to display the response to the user.

Why is response time so important? Would it hurt your visitors to wait just a few more seconds for your page to appear? Well, to cut a long story short - Yes, it will hurt your visitors' experience and it will hurt your site.

When you are online, every second counts. The abundance of websites on various topics, located only a few clicks away from each other is why your site can not afford to lose visitors and prospective clients over such a little thing as bad response time.