My client wants to migrate his databases to a hosted site. I'm just getting my feet wet here.

I saw two earlier recommendations for buddysystems.com and pointinspace - but I want to be sure we will get fast response.

I tried a free trial with a company called datatrium, but access is unacceptably slow. So, the big question: is the response speed 100% determined by our internet connection, meaning they're all going to be the same, or is there such a thing as faster servers? If so, who's got em?

thanks

It's all about bandwidth. Typically you will only receive at 2Mbit, which I suspect is significantly beneath the "push" speed from the provider.

If you want to simulate low bandwidth then get an old 10-base hub (NOT A SWITCH) and connect 8 machines upto it. You'll now be receiving around 1Mbit per machine - which may be close to the reality of a broadband link.

Incidentally there were significant speed increases with FMP7/8 as previous versions were intolerably slow with large amounts of data being shipped by the host for the client to process.

We run all our FileMaker 7 + 8 databases on FileMaker Server Advanced, with Apache running on a separate machine. All servers are dual-processor Xserves with plenty of RAM. All servers are on an internal switched network, connected to the Internet via multiple T-3 (30x T1 speed) lines to diverse providers, with multiple T-1 backups.

Note that we offer a 30 day trial with all accounts, whereby if you aren't satisfied with our service in any way within the first 30 days you can cancel and owe nothing.

We have been hosting FileMaker since 1997. You can feel free to contact any of the clients listed in the Current Clients section of our web site as well for opinions.

- John