Web Accelerator Wars
Posted on July 19, 2008 at 5:23 am
Looking for a good free web accelerator? Firstly I would like to thank Pallab, one of our regular readers, for giving me the idea for this post by mentioning OnSpeed in a comment upon my previous entry about Propel Accelerator. I figured a good comparison of the main web accelerators would be useful, so here it is!
As I have mentioned before, most of the time I access the Internet via a GPRS EDGE connection through a mobile phone, it’s about the same speed as a 128k DSL connection, but with far higher latency (over 1000ms usually). Because of this terribly slow connection, I have found using a web accelerator has saved me hundreds, if not thousand of hours over the last couple of years.
Below I am going to review the four most popular web accelerators, the way I have worked out the scoring is very simple, I used each one (with one notable exception to be explained later) for two days on a free trial, the resulting score is the overall percentage of compression I received over the two days.
87% – Propel Accelerator – $44.95 per year – http://www.propel.com
I am not going to say an awful lot about Propel, as I have reviewed it before. I was not surprised to find that it performed the best of the bunch, it is a class product and one I highly recommend. I especially like the progressive image loading feature that works with suitably enabled browsers. A low res image is first loaded and then rendered in increasingly greater detail once bandwidth becomes available.
72% – OnSpeed - £24.99 per year – www.onspeed.com
OnSpeed managed to achieve some good compression statistics but was let down by latency issues, at times I had to disable it as it was taking several minutes to open a page, pretty ridiculous for a product that was supposed to speed up my Internet connection! The client is very simple, and it failed to accelerate my email client, which was a disappointment, as I receive many large attachments. It also has a habit of reconnecting to the service frequently, which gets very annoying after a while.
63% – Proxyconn – $47.88 per years – http://www.proxyconn.com
I got off to a really bad start with Proxyconn. They advertise a free trial upon their website, which I signed up for, only to find that they had immediately charge my credit card for a yearly subscription. A phone call to their customer support people found that they had pre-authorised the payment for a subscription once the trial ended, and the funds took 4 days to be paid back onto my card after I cancelled the trial, this is just a dirty way to try and trick people out of their cash. The client is very simple, and many settings cannot be changed, it also failed to load several times when rebooting Vista, overall this was a pretty negative experience.
0% – Nitro – $25 per year – http://www.nitroglobal.com
I fully intended to review Nitro, but they offer no free trial! Well, they do say they have one on their website, but I could find no way to sign up for it, the referring page just loops back to itself. Wake up people at Nitro, get your act together, when your competitors are all offering a free evaluation period, how do you expect to compete? New users who would naturally be distrustful of the claims made by web accelerator providers are not going to pay out cash for a product they cannot try first.
And that about sums it up, overall Propel Accelerator appears to be the best product by far, although OnSpeed may work well for you if you have a good route to their servers (I don’t so latency is a problem). Proxyconn are in 3rd place, although I am concerned about their business practices. Nitro just need to wake up and give a free trial, I can’t help but think they are hiding an inferior product.
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Thank you for your reviews. I found Propel to be fast but had trouble with freezing and unwanted dial-ups, so I cancelled. I downloaded Nitro’s free trial (ha ha) but could not get the password. They are spoiling themselves or it’s a con.
Look people, it’s best to avoid software like this. These Internet accelerators usually have some kind of spyware or malware.
You want to increase the speed of your Internet, bite the bullet and get a faster Internet connection or a better computer. No two ways around it.