I Pinged a popular host, and it shows 86.7 ms. Another host shows 36.7 ms. That means
 

I Pinged a bunch of sites hosted on a popular host, and it shows 86.7 ms. Another host shows 36.7 ms for the sites it hosts. Both of these hosts are comparable in prices, and supposedly have high quality NON-Cogent bandwidth. Does That means that the 36.7 ms host has better bandwidth? How much stock can I put into this?

This is the tool I used to ping these hosts:
http://www.alertsite.com/cgi-bin/tsite3.pl

try couple of diffrent places to ping from.

that is just from wherever that machine was located
they could be in the same state or something along those lines

i would not go with what there " ping " is lol

you need to go do some research on things like latency and the speed of light.

Yeah ping has too much to do with distance and location.. Not a viable test.

I would be more concerned with troughput than ping... latency for web traffic isn't a real big deal, anything less than 120ms won't be noticeable to a user.

Yup, what he said. Even Cogent is faster than Verio when you ping it from certain parts of the country.

You would have to ping from all the major cities around the US and compare averages to see which host has a better response time. But like someone already said, if it's under 120ms, the end user certainly won't notice any difference.

If you want to know
http://www.traceroute.org/
:smilie_we

ok, great guys, thank you very much for the help, this really claryfied some things for me.

So is there any online tools that I can use to find out which host is faster?

bump for the nightcrew

It depends on the route at the time, also.

Don't forget about packet loss...

Rhino -

Look, youre trying to target surfers right?

It seems as if you want the best host possible to support your traffic overall, so what you want is a host located in the CENTRAL USA.

Chicago, Dallas, Kansas, St. Louis

Those would be good places to start looking for a host. Otherwise youre going to keep getting mixed and unlikeable results. The host which pings or is faster to you, may be slow to everyone else.

Get something that you know will be good for the rest, find a host that is in the central of the US, as you seem to want to want the best available for your "SPECIFIC" purpose.

There is NO best for everyone, just a best for YOU.

Now, heres a list of providers I know in the central USA:

Reflected(CHI), ServerCentral(CHI), ThePlanet(DAL), CyberCon (STL), Xeolink(STL), and FoundryNAP (CHI).

That's one of the funniest posts I have ever read.

so is what he is saying off base?