As a designer would you move host?

worc

I previously asked about whether the hosting provider is where the primary blame should fall for high server load on shared hosting which was moved to the server forum but I was curious about whether, as designers, would you move host if twice now you have had sites that had some major slow load times and high server loads?

When it happened first I had the sites moved but recently they are back to slow again and Webmaster tools is classifying my site load times as "slow" now.

Sites don't come close to space allocation or bandwidth limits. One has about 10 visits a day and the other may be 100. Nothing major about the sites visits wise but they are for one small business and another sports club so they are still important to those who own them.

jmcc

worc wrote: »

When it happened first I had the sites moved but recently they are back to slow again and Webmaster tools is classifying my site load times as "slow" now.

Google's WMT speed rankings are rubbish. Ignore them and use proper speed checks to evaluate the speed of your site and host.

Regards...jmcc

Shzm

I've moved hosts before from slowness. That was however because some people had commented it was slow, and i'd noticed it a bit myself. Webmaster tools was reporting it was very slow aswell. However, this was a UK ecommerce site that I decided would be better off with UK hosting anyway (it was on US servers).

It was pretty painless, all I needed to do was send on the cpanel backup to my new host and they just set them all up.

worc

jmcc wrote: »

Google's WMT speed rankings are rubbish. Ignore them and use proper speed checks to evaluate the speed of your site and host.

When I go to the sites they take minimum 5-10 seconds to first respond at best, sometimes up to 30 seconds. I was using WMT's purely as an additional way of showing they were slow .

Logging into hosting account the servor loads are showing a red exclamation point beside them and have been like this consistently for the past 2 weeks.

jmcc

worc wrote: »

When I go to the sites they take minimum 5-10 seconds to first respond at best, sometimes up to 30 seconds. I was using WMT's purely as an additional way of showing they were slow .

There are many reasons for this. Sometimes it is a poorly coded site on a badly overloaded shared hosting server. Other times it can be your link to the server. There are so many variables that it would require a number of tests from a few locations and networks to be certain. One of the problems I've seen is widget crap that web devs add to sites. These widgets are often near the top of the page and slow the page loading and rendering. Then there's a pile of Javascript crap that web devs add to their site to track usage - again a lot of it on badly overloaded and linked servers. This too slows page rendering. As a very crude metric, check the page load time with Javascript off.

Logging into hosting account the servor loads are showing a red exclamation point beside them and have been like this consistently for the past 2 weeks.

Then move. It it could be an overloaded database server (a real problem if the site is using a pile of db calls to build a page) or some mad php problem caused by someone who doesn't know how to write php.

Regards...jmcc

jmcc

Just to expand on the importance of database and php design, my main site averages 110K pages a day. It is running on a P4 server with 4G of RAM. The database calls are pared down to the bare minimum. The database itself is around 160G. The db is optimised but it would be impossible to run such a site on shared hosting. The only time the server is under serious load is during an update.

Regards...jmcc