Unit 28 Task 2

these factors affect site performance on user side
Due to the website being a video hosting/ review site users with a low download speed are going to be put off by the fact their videos will constantly stop and need to buffer if the videos are too long, this can of course be offset by offering to play the video in a series 15 minute parts which would load quicker than a 90 minute movie.

Processor speed will also affect the buffer speed of the videos, low spec processors may not even be able to load the videos at all, and there is nothing that can be done about this however.

Browser is the user’s choice on whether to use Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc. Google sites for example work better on Chrome than other browsers, and Chrome is also believed to be the fastest browser currently.

these factors affect site performance on server side

Web server capacity refers to the amount of data that a particular web server has available for use. Privately owned servers charge money per byte used to store information, MP3 and video files tend to be larger than most image and text documents and as such video hosting site like YouTube would cost a lot of money to run. As YouTube is owned by Google, the cost is negated by the fact Google owns the servers anyway.

A web ‘hit’ is a request to a server for a file.  When a web page is uploaded from a server the number of "hits" or "page hits" is equal to the number of files requested. Therefore, one page load does not always equal one hit because often pages are made up of other images and other files which stack up the number of hits counted. Because one page load does not equal one hit it is an inaccurate measure of a website's popularity or web traffic.