Hosting comparison, India: 6 popular hosting plans measured by response time
Most hosting comparisons in India publish one response time figure. This article breaks it into five phases for six Indian hosting providers, measured every 60 seconds since May 2026.
Most people arriving here want one of these two pages:
If you are a developer, sysadmin or work in hosting support, the rest of this page goes deeper: the full timing breakdown behind those rankings.
Hosting performance comparison: key findings
- TLS handshake is the largest phase on every host, ranging from 75ms to 200ms across the six providers measured.
- DNS lookup does not differentiate hosts, sitting between 10ms and 16ms on all six hosting plans from different hosts.
- Indian data centres connect in under 6ms, against 59ms and 102ms for the two hosts serving India from Singapore Data center.
- Server processing is near-identical among 4 Indian hosts, from 34.44ms to 41.81ms, a spread of 7 milliseconds, except hosts serving from Singapore sitting at 70.47ms and 118.90ms respectively
Hosting plan comparison, reponse time phase comparison
90-day medians in milliseconds, measured from Mumbai on an identical static page with no CDN and no caching.
| Provider | DNS | TCP | TLS | Server | Download | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
BigRock
Mumbai
|
14.72 | 3.49 | 80.42 | 34.50 | 0.12 | 133.25 |
|
Bluehost
Mumbai
|
15.62 | 3.57 | 91.21 | 39.44 | 0.16 | 150.00 |
|
Milesweb
Mumbai
|
15.27 | 3.47 | 104.54 | 43.26 | 0.20 | 166.74 |
|
Hostinger
Mumbai
|
13.35 | 3.62 | 160.31 | 36.26 | 0.11 | 213.65 |
|
GoDaddy
Singapore Outside India
|
10.79 | 59.36 | 188.16 | 70.58 | 0.08 | 328.97 |
|
Namecheap
Singapore Outside India
|
12.60 | 102.38 | 158.71 | 118.70 | 0.09 | 392.48 |
Milliseconds, averaged over the last 90 days from a Mumbai probe. Phases are incremental and sum to the total. How we measure
Why Singapore hosting is slower for India
The distance cost, and why no plan upgrade removes it.
What does TCP connect actually measure?
The network round trip needed to open a connection. No application logic runs during it, so it reflects physical distance and routing rather than the host’s hardware or configuration.
Why does the server phase look slower too?
Because the distance is paid twice. The request travels out and the first byte travels back, and both crossings sit inside the server response measurement.
Namecheap records 118.90ms against BigRock’s 34.44ms. Much of that gap is travel, not processing.
Can this be optimised away?
Not from the site’s side. A higher plan tier, better caching or a lighter theme will not recover it. For an Indian audience, only a data centre closer to the visitor will.
Does that make Singapore hosting a poor choice?
Only for an Indian audience. The same measurement that penalises these hosts from Mumbai would favour them from Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia.
If your visitors are spread across South East Asia, or global rather than concentrated in India, a Singapore data centre is a reasonable choice and may be the better one. Our figures describe performance for Indian visitors specifically, which is what this site measures.
TLS handshake times vary by more than double
Among hosts whose hardware performs almost identically.
What does the spread suggest?
The four Indian providers process requests within 7 milliseconds of each other, so the underlying hardware performs at a similar level.
Their handshake times differ by more than twice. Handshake duration depends on protocol version, cipher selection, certificate chain length, session resumption and OCSP stapling, which points to configuration rather than capacity.
How much does it affect a real visitor?
Less than the figures suggest, because the handshake is paid when a connection is established rather than on every request. Session resumption removes it for returning visitors.
It still lands on the first connection, which is the one a new visitor experiences.
What each hosting performance phase means
What this hosting comparison does not measure
A single Mumbai probe against an identical static page. It does not represent every network path into these data centres, and it does not measure behaviour under load.
Figures are medians of hourly samples across 90 days. A median describes the typical case and deliberately discards outliers, so it does not show the worst moments.
It also says nothing about support quality, control panels, backups or migration.
What this comparison shows
Across six Indian shared hosting plans, most of the difference in response time comes from two things, and neither is server hardware.
- Physical distance decides the floor. Hosting served from Singapore starts around 60ms behind before any processing happens, and nothing on the site can recover it. For a South East Asian or global audience, the same hosts look different.
- Among hosts inside India, the handshake decides the rest. Server processing varies by 7 milliseconds; TLS varies by more than ninety.
- DNS is not a differentiator at this level, and content download is negligible on a static page.