Should I get a new webhost?

You should immediately switch to a new host, preferably to something located in the US. You didn't mention your budget, but it's hard to beat HostGator in terms of popularity.

I did a test on loadimpact.com and this is my stats:

Aggregated (World, Chicago, USA):

Count: 97
Test min: 10.97 seconds
Last: 57 seconds
Test max: 1.7 minutes

Whatever you do, please don't use HostGator.
Their support has gone terrible, their stability also sucks now. They used to be good, before around a year or two ago.

Look into LiquidWeb. Their support is terrific, and their stability is also great.

Is your site custom built or are you running Wordpress. Do you have caching in place? Make a simple HTML file that is just a <H1> tag that says Hello. What is the load time on that specific file? You want to make sure you don't need to optimize your code or have some other solution before switching hosts or the problem will follow you.

I would definitely move to a US server. Are you on a shared server?

Also, take a look at the content of your site. Could you make images smaller in size, for example? You can test your site for free at Load Impact - On Demand Website Load Testing and Performance Testing Service (no need to register) which supplies you with a lot of data.

I was thinking of signing up for account at these providers:

- Bluehost
- Hostgator
- LiquidWeb
- Site5

I will then install wordpress on each one of them and then do a test to see which page loads the fastest. The fastest one I will keep, the rest of them I will ask for a refund of.

What do you think, is this a good and accurate strategy?

I use hostgator for my hosting, they do pretty good on the shared servers. They can have down times sometimes, they just had a major server update and it took a while for all my servers to go to the new nameservers etc. But over all Hostgator is good. My thoughts on blue host is to be careful, don't pull to much on your server or you will be told. One of our clients has this all the time, because of users that use bots that would post thousands of spam messages and blogs. So I had to fix it. Anyways, that's with most share hosting packages.


Stick to USA hosting like tritrain said.
Hostgator A+ for me.
Bluehost A-
site5 - Never used them
GOdaddy - Stay away from the voodoo lol. I don't like the setup never user friendly.

Was hostgator not having some issues a few weeks back after they went through some type of take over? Just wondering if their issues were over. I have used them in the past and not had any problems. I currently use Namecheap and have been happy as well.

I like namecheap for Domains. The only problems I had with hostgator recently was the change to new nameservers. Then it took a while for them to even out the servers and now their fine. I like their cpanel, its upgraded a lot since the recent changes.

go and get your private server , also you can use cloudflare it will help a lot .

Thanks for the answers!

I just did a test with both Bluehost and Site5. At Bluehost, I use a hosting account for $19.90/month (I think it's called "Premium Shared Hosting" or something like that).
At Site5, I use shared hosting + turbo for $13,90 a month.

Site5 won.

I just switched to ASmallOrange today because I had enough with my slow hosting provider (FatCow). I read that ASmallOrange is one of the fastest for the price (10/month for the medium plan) and has the best support. It doesn't have unlimited bandwith/storage but I've been reading that no one truly has "unlimited" anything. And on a shared server having limits in place is better for everyone (or so I read). I'll see how it works, anything has to be better than FatCow though.

Used to be a Hostgator fan until they shut down my blogs without warning and told me to fix cache issues. Wish they would have given me at least 24 hours notice (48 would have been even better)...

Having said that... I use HawkHost now and am very happy with them...

Is anybody else locked out of their hostgator account today?

Kinda getting tired of their @#$%!!

They force me to change my password to make it stronger. I make it 100% strong. So damn strong that I'll never remember it.

Then they tell me that 100 out of 100 strength isn't strong enough.

Stay away from the gator. There is a new issue EVERY WEEK.

I have good experience with Host9. Their have server in different location that you can choose when buying the hosting. Furthermore, their support is awesome!

I host my sites on Bluehost (Shared), Hostgator (Reseller - shared) and Site5 (Reseller - Cloud - Shared).

I can honestly say that I'm not impressed with any of them.

I am least impressed with Bluehost and have been slowly moving all my sites away from them over the past couple of years. One more to go and I'm FREE - Free I tell you!

Site 5 is fast but they want you to upgrade when your site gets popular. I'm on the $50/mo plan with them - the cloud hosting. I moved my most popular site over to Site5 after Hostgator had problems with it, and it was about 2 weeks later before Site5 also had a problem with it. I haven't had a problem with them since I tweaked all my sites, but as much as I dislike Hostgator - I think they are much better setup for Wordpress sites than Site5.

Anyway, I can talk about problems with all of these hosts for the next year, but I want to help you instead.

I've spent months trying to keep hosts happy and all 3 of them are "happy" with me now (even if I'm still not impressed with them).

So I created a spreadsheet checklist of all the things to do to speed up your site on shared hosting servers:

[Checklist] Shared Hosting High CPU Usage - WordPress

The post is way too big to post on this forum, but contains a good checklist of what I do any time a site is peaking on a shared host including:

* 26 things I always do whenever I get a message from a host about one of my sites
* 9 things I always do to try and figure out the 'cause' of the problem
* 13 things to try after you've already tried everything

You can read it online or you can download it as a excel spreadsheet and go through everything.

Obviously - if you have the money to upgrade to a virtual or dedicated server - that is the easiest, quickest fix. But if you can't afford to upgrade, then this will help you make your site faster, more secure, and stop shared hosts from having a sook.

you should have hosted it in local server from the start,
but it's never too late, you can switch to hostgator, it's realy great, fast and reliable and less expensive too.

I recommend HostGator. I have no problems with them.

Be sure to read this thread- http://forums.hostgator.com/site-moved-new-server-and-now-t265084.html

OK are you using host gator? That one is S--L--O--W!

Start finding new web hosting services. They are not all the same. Most are not great if you have a lot of videos and images. Yeah, those can be hard on a server. Also, smaller ones are not that great at stopping hackers or viruses. Perhaps you can use rack space. Well, that is if you are serious. Rack space is expensive.

Always web hosting use to be a great service. Most of the time they were up. However, they just got bought up. Like we will see next year. I am not having right now any problems so far, but I do not expect the same level of service.

Basically, you get that for which you pay.....

10 seconds is REALLY long lol. Are you sure you really need all that stuff on your page?

I've never ran into problems like that, perhaps its because i keep my sites relatively simple

Have your site optimized by a specialist and consider MaxCDN - it really improved the speed of my blog.

Take Care,
Carol

I have a contrarian view of Host Gator, I hate them. I've gone through about 10 different hosts testing to find what I like and find a few things are critical:

1. 24/7 PHONE support - when you're working with developers around the world, traveling, etc. this is key, lots of companies have 24/7 email support (I've had to deal with Host Gator, Domain.com and others this way) and it's a royal pain compared with jumping on the phone talking to someone live and resolving it immediately, need to include amazing customer service in this equation

2. Speed & reliability - if your page doesn't load and doesn't stay up none of the rest matters, factor geo-redundancy into this, I didn't think it was a big deal until some major services friends were using went down when the hurricane hit New York, most of us can't have our sites down like that

3. Cronjobs - this is something you don't learn about until you do more advanced development, but most companies don't support them and for some advanced development you end up needing them so make sure the host supports them

4. Support for multiple domains - some hosts like Yahoo have some great stuff going for them but only support one domain per hosting account, which is lame and gets expensive, in a perfect world you want support for unlimited but certainly for a bunch


I've compared:
- Yahoo
- Host Gator
- Blue Host
- Dream Host
- Site 5
- Web Hosting Pad
- GoDaddy
- Domain.com
- Green Geeks
- Host Papa

And a couple others. In my opinion the best for hosting for small businesses is Inmotion Hosting. I would recommend NOT buying domains through them, it's over priced, but for the hosting itself I find they are the way to go.

Hope that helps.

It depends what you have on your page.
Any images? Wordpress etc...

I have been using Hostgator for the past few years with no issues at all until the past few months when they switched to new servers and all my sites slow down to a crawl. Can you believe that a simple 1 page squeeze page takes about 5 seconds to load? I was driving traffic from solo ads to the site and was wondering why I got only 2 opt-in from 100 clicks!

I have since switched to Veerotech.net as they emphasize on creating non-overloaded web hosting environments. The owner is also a fellow warrior and so far I am satisfied - good upload speed and fast support. You also want to try out Arvixe Web Hosting. A few of my friends have switched from Hostgator to Arvixe and they have only good words to say about the company.

I just got F**** by hostgator. I accidentally deleted some critical code and contacted support to restore my website. Apparently, their servers were under maintenance and after maintenance, they no longer had my backup files.

Have to rebuild an entire website. Other than that, hostgator has been decent though their DNS is slow (might switch to the elite rackspace now after that debacle)

Sorry, but that's not Hostgator's fault. They're a terrible host, yes, but you did that to yourself. You should always keep local backups.

I switched to host gator a year ago and they work great however is use three other services also watch the video you decide.

It may not be about the host, might be the website.

Use cloudflare, a CDN to help improve the speed of your site. You can also use MAX CDN to have things like images hosted elsewhere, improving the load time of your site.

Stay away form Hostgator:
- Slow sites
- Sites down all the time
- Slow customer service
- Lockdown issues
- Expensive compared to quality

I second (or third?) site5. Been with them a while now. A free first month, best support ever, amazing prices, and awesome stability. What else could you ask for?