Hosting for international e-commerce site

shgavman

Hi all,

Anyone have a recommendation for a hosting company that would be suited to visitors from both europe and US?

The shared hosting company I have (with server in Ireland) has painful load times for users from the states (>20s)

It's 7s for Irish users which seems slow to me but support from the provider suggested it wasn't bad.

Thanks

Trojan

We cannot discuss specific hosting companies. 20s is a painful load time, and 7s is slower than it should be, but it very well could be reasonable depending on the page weight, nature and number of components. Do a speed test and find out where the bottleneck is.

shgavman

Thanks Trojan, yeah that's where I had run the test myself

Here's the results.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130409_D0_1BCB/

18 seconds for the first byte (which is worse than the 7 seconds I was gettings today)

It's a reputable hosting company so I'm very surprised.

Trojan

Possibly a db issue. Make sure Smarty cache is enabled.

More reading for you on this issue - known TTFB delays in Presta.

shgavman

Thanks again Trojan. I had smarty cache enabled.

I've enabled "High risk HTML compression" and it seems to have improved things - albeit intermittently, sometimes 8s, sometimes 3s. I'm a noob and don't understand why it worked but it did so thanks! I found it at your link.

amen

Look at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

Some good suggestions there.

Giblet

It's a software issue amen, presta seem to have released a dog. 18 seconds even without caching is horrific.

jmcc

Don't most e-commerce packages send some bytes before the main page data? That 18s initial response is a very serious issue. To test whether it is just software issue (it may well be) or a wider server issue, create a simple HTML page and do a few speed tests on that page from random speedtest sites. That may help to identify whether it is an overloaded server/network latency or a problem with the e-commerce software. That link that Trojan provided above mentioned that there were some database table indexing issues (a very effective way of killing load times) and a folder issue. A cold listing of a directory with tens of thousands of files on an EXT3 file system can take some time (a minute or more) even with RAID and a fast processor. Other filesystems may be better (ReiserFS or XFS) but the problem seems to be a database/index issue.

Regards...jmcc

Trojan

jmcc wrote: »

Don't most e-commerce packages send some bytes before the main page data? That 18s initial response is a very serious issue.

A lot of CMS, without caching enabled, will wait for several (many) db calls to return before supplying first byte. I reckon that's the issue here (with Presta "releasing a dog" )

shgavman

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'll try out your suggestion jmcc with simple HTML page.

I need to assess that my hosting company is sound before I install a webservice (for an app I'm developing) on it.

So, thanks again everyone.