Best Hosting?

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I have a wordpress site that is doing well but is getting really low speed scores. I put in a CDN with Amazon but that only moved the speed a little.

I am wondering if my hosting setup is the problem. I am running this as an addon domain with Bluehost. Is that the problem? Would it run faster as a primary domain? Is Bluehost the problem?

Mike
#website design #hosting
  • You can try Google pagespeed.
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  • I don't really want cheap. I want good.
  • Bluehost and all the EIG owned hosting companies are crowding too many sites on their shared servers. It appears that there may be 2,000 sites on the server for your Achieve The Green Beret Way web site.
    2021 websites with IP 69.89.31.238

    I came up with a short list of shared hosting providers that seem reasonable and don't get many bad reviews:
    Glowhost
    Arvixe
    Frog Host - Web Hosting
    Site5 Web Hosting
    Siteground
    JaguarPC
    PacificHost

    I moved several of my sites to Glowhost, because they seemed to be the best deal for me. They handled the relocation of more than 25 sites without a glitch, no downtime.

    Hostgator, Hostmonster, Bluehost, Ipage, JustHost and FatCow are all heavily promoted hosts that are owned by EIG and most are hosted in the same datacenter owned by EIG and are quickly gaining a reputation for bad customer service and lousy performance.
    See a complete list of EIG sites [to stay away from]here:
    Endurance International Group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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    • This is really useful.

      Thanks,
      Mike

    • But one IP can be shared by more than 1 server. So, 2021 websites with the same IP need not mean that they are all on the same server.
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  • Can you give any other details on the site itself other than that it's Wordpress?

    What type of content is on the site? (is it image heavy?)

    Where are the majority of your viewers at?

    How often are you adding content?

    What plugins are you currently using?

    What theme are you currently using?

    Any other info would help..
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  • That site loads soooo sssssllloooooowwwwww.
    It's likely the overloaded Bluehost servers that does it.

    All you really need is a better host.
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    • ^This. The problem most likely is NOT the site itself.

      Browsing the site, I don't see anything that sticks out that should be causing issues. The slow "loading" of the site seems more like a mySQL issue - IE overloaded.
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  • Mike, I've been with the same host since 2002. I have run shared sites (about $4 a month), Reseller accounts ($20 a month) and for a few years I had my own dedicated server.

    They do not have an affiliate scheme so I get nothing for recommending them to you. I can vouch for their speed, 99.9% uptime, support and of course they have a fully featured cPanel and for resellers they use WHM.

    If you want high quality at a what I think is a reasonable price with an 11 year reference you can feel confident going with .
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  • you can try network solution.
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    • Hi Mike,
      I have found bluehost to be too slow, some of my other sites on hostgator seem to be a bit faster.
      The list above is a good start, you might want to look at webhostingtalk.com to see their reviews.

      Another alternative is to try a local hosting company, usually they will try a bit harder to keep your business.
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  • If you don't want cheap and care about quality, there are some really good wordpress specialists. WPEngine is the one I recommend. Synthesis and page.ly are also really good.

    They cost $20 - $25 per month but if you consider the value, they are really good. These hosts will take care of everything about your Wordpress site - caching, optimization, installting plugins etc, backups. If you are looking for a very fast site and zero headaches, this is the way to go.
  • Mike, you can change hosts, but I bet the difference in your site loading speed will be negligible compared to what you'll see if you make some on-page improvements. Bluehost is not a top notch host, but your site is probably going to be slow on any host you go with. I'll try to explain.

    Your web site needs to go on a weight loss program.

    Your site, along with all of the images, style sheets, javascripts, and other assets weighs in at a whopping 3 megabytes. You know what else is three megabytes? An mp3 file, or a photograph in jpeg format from a 16 megapixel camera. That's a lot of data that people have to download when they visit your homepage on an empty cache.

    To give you another example, when visiting your homepage, a visitor will download 10 times as much data as they would if they visited the Warriorforum home page.

    So basically, your site has tons of bloat. I'm not going to go through everything, but here's an example of the type of bloat I'm talking about - click the following image link.

    http://images.homedefensegun.net/wp-...L._SL1500_.jpg

    That picture is huge. That's an image on your site which loads when somebody visits your home page and it's displayed much smaller - but the whole huge image has to be downloaded even though it's displayed really small on your home page.

    Here's another image from your homepage that is unnecessarily large at 293 kb http://images.homedefensegun.net/wp-...0%B2%D0%B0.png It would be very easy to save that image with compression and make it under 15 kb.

    There are probably many more examples of huge unoptimized images on your homepage. They may look small on your site, but web visitors have to download the large image, because that's what's referenced in your HTML.

    That's probably the bulk of your problem right there. There's no hosting that's going to make your homepage load fast when your homepage weighs in at 3 MB. With that size of a page, the only thing that will make an appreciable difference is if all of your visitors upgraded to fiber internet connections.

    Get that figured out first. Trim the fat. You'll still want to get a better host, and you could do that now, a bloated site on a good host will still be slow.

    Actually, you have tons of assets (javascript and whatnot) that isn't even hosted on Bluehost. You have lots of stuff from other domains that have to be downloaded whenever a person visits your site for the first time.

    And speaking of scripts, it looks like you've got some scripts that somewhat delay the page rendering. According to Google PageSpeed Insights, "Your page has 7 blocking script resources and 6 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page."

    What that means is that even though most stuff needed to make the page appear in a web browser has been downloaded, there are Javascripts that cause the browser to postpone rendering the page. The visitor can't see the page until that's taken care of.

    So you've got too much javascript. Too much CSS. Images that are too large. You've got too much of things and too big of things being downloaded. And on an empty cache, a web browser has to make 127 requests to download all of that stuff. There's also DNS requests that have to be done for all of the domains that all of that stuff comes from.

    I just noticed that you have 2.2 megabytes of images on your home page. That's a ridiculous amount. Optimize those and figure out which javascript(s) is slowing down page rendering and you'll be way ahead.

    Go ahead and get away from Bluehost/EIG as others have suggested, but the main thing you'll need to focus on right now, and what you'll see the greatest improvement with, is trimming all that fat from your pages.

    Check out WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles Thinkpad...homedefensegun.net/ - 12/10/13 02:02:23 for a good analysis of how your homepage downloads and then renders in the browser.

    Similarly, check out https://developers.google.com/speed/...ensegun.net%2F and Website speed test . There's a lot to learn from those graphs. If you don't know what all that stuff means, just ask somebody here.
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  • Is there a way to optimize the images without going through one by one? I am using EWWW Image Optimizer but I am guessing it isn't working...
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    • A google search indicates that there's no shortage of people having trouble getting EWWW Image Optimizer to work with W3 Total Cache. I don't know that much about either of those plugins, so I couldn't tell you what to do.

      Maybe you could try another image optimizing plugin like WordPress › WP Smush.it « WordPress Plugins
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  • Dynamic content doesn't get cached.

    Viewing some of the other sites hosted on the same server, yield the same slow results.

    Just remember, a web page test is only going to report how well the site performs on that server. If it's overloaded, the test results will be poor as well. The slowness pops up after browsing 2-3 pages deep, not immediately, which tells you that it's directly a mySQL problem. It varies from minute to minute.

    The advice given here is good, but it's more so putting lipstick on a pig.

    The longest query is a wait query upon load - Wordpress site...hmmmm still betting SQL.

    OP - switch to a better host and I bet you'll have a faster site.

    Also, run up the block a few IP's, guarantee you at least 5-10 IP's serving about 1,000 sites each are on the same physical server.
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    • also, don't take my last post as discounting the advice mojojuju is giving...its great advice.

      switch first, then optimize. Don't add a bunch of plugins to do all these tasks, it will most likely continue to make it sluggish.
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  • You may have a deal with such hosting as ifastnet and a2hosting, these two companies are respectable and they are able to meet the needs of any discriminating webmaster.
    Servers are stable and prices are not high on their services.
    And they have active support.
  • I used to to have a dedicated server in my garage that connected to the internet through Wi-Fi. Would that work?
  • There's some good advice by @mojojuju. Even if everything else is pretty well optimized, combining and minimizing the JS and CSS files can make noticeable difference. You can do this with W3 Total Cache, but it's probably going to take some experimentation. For example, on one site I recently optimized I couldn't combine certain Javascript files or the slider would not work.

    Google's speed tool is very helpful with this kind of optimization.

    Having said that, I'd also switch hosts first. Bluehost is just slow. I'm using EuroVPS' shared hosting which works fine. I hear Hawkhost and Stablehost might be good.
  • No.
    "Dedicated server" means nothing. It could be junk compared to shared or VPS.
  • Site5.com is great!

    I have a site with 2k daily visitors at their shared and it rarely time outs. Speed is great too and they are pretty cool on resource usage https://www.site5.com/legal/resource-usage/
  • It's not that simple. You need to manage the server, install updates and harden the operating system. If you can't or aren't willing to do that your server will be a huge security risk.

    If you get a poor entry-level managed server (such as the ones OVH rents for cheap) you might not be any better off than right now. Yes, you have access to the whole server, but it's slow and probably not optimized for hosting.

    Managed dedicated is probably way more expensive than the shared hosting OP is using now.
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  • While Using Wordpress the only concern is customization properly otherwise the issue of website security and browser compatibility rises. All Images to be kept in single folder , using gzip to compress.
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  • I switched over to a Genesis child theme and the site is running a lot faster. I also cleaned up a lot of plugins. I found that Digg Digg was slowing the site down too. There is a good Digg Digg alternative that is a lot faster, but not quite as pretty.
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    • Don't stop there though. There's still a lot of room for improvement.
  • I'm currently running a couple of sites with hostgator but they don't have near the amount of traffic you mentioned, but last year I ran a couple of sites with hostmonster and I was getting around 15k to 20k unique visitors a day and the sites were running fine.

    I'm not sure if hostgator and hostmonster are from the same company though, they probably are. Correct me if I'm wrong.

    znan
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    • They are both EIG brands. So are all of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endura...hosting_brands

      I suspect that not all EIG brands are the same. Before EIG acquired Hostmonster and Bluehost, Bluehost and Hostmonster were already under the same ownership, and Bluehost was said to be on better hardware and had better performance. Perhaps EIG's vDeck brands like iPage, Fatcow, etc are of lesser quality than their cPanel brands. I don't have any definite proof of it though.
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  • A good web hosting is all about support. If you don't have good, fast support, it really doesn't matter wherever you paid little or a lot.
    I recommend liquidweb for their technical support.
  • That used to be the case -- vDeck crappier than cPanel. But it's flipped in the last 12-18 months.
  • At the OP, if you want a good hosting service, you may have it from ifastnet or readymakers.
    Both companies have stable servers and resourceful plan and their prices are competitive.
  • Any good managed hosting should be able to help you get your site up to speed. I would consider a managed VPS with someone like WiredTree or Bluehost. Sometimes in these situations, a smaller hosting company with a greater focus on customer service is the best solution, because they will work with you to get your site up to speed and find whatever issues may be ailing it.
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    • Bluehost is an EIG brand -- ie, crap to be avoided.
      That's not a small host.
  • I spent eight years on blue host and it was great until recently when I managed to triple my traffic. My site started bogging down and was quite sluggish.

    I upgraded to pro hosting so there would be less shared accounts... but it didn't help much.

    I ended up deciding to go either VPS or dedicated... that crap was expensive though. A friend from the site pointed me to a German hosting company that auctions off last year's equipment cheap... Instead of a hundred a month I'm paying 30 and the site speed improvement is unreal...

    I'm quite pleased. The host name is Hetzner and you can Google them if you need a good dedicated server. I also have an account with host gator right now but it's been a nightmare so far... I don't even want to get into it... suffice to say I now loathe them, but for cheap pay by the month hosting they are the way to go I guess. You can start a site with about $20.

    I should note that by choosing a dedicated server you do need to know your stuff... Hetzner provides the machine and access... it's fairly blank so you need to do everything from installing your OS to setting up MySql.

    It's not a task for a newb...

    Anyway, just wanted to share my experience with Blue host. Your issue is probably the bloat more than anything else as has been stated previously.

    Good luck!
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  • For sites with 20.000 unique visitor/day I suggest namecheap, I have online media (newspapper) in namecheap and is very good.
    For business site I'm using reseller from: https://www.theshosting.com/ its my first experience (8month) and they have amazing support.
    I build my new site, its very slow. I contact with support and they clean my site, deactive problematic plugins etc, sure with my permission.
  • The best hosts are iFastNet.com as they have solid servers which are supported well and their plans are full of useful resources which are so necessary to feel fine in the IT world.
  • GVO Hosting is considered by most internet marketers as one of best.They've got excellent support and they even provide you with free website tools like an autoresponder,video producer,conference room and also a great affiliate program.
    Host Then Profit - Powerful Business Tools & Hosting GVO Host Then Profits
  • There's some wordpress icons that will help boost your site speed. W3 cache, Smush.it - just to name a few.

    If you're not worried about investing, look into your own VPS (virtual private server) that way you don't have to worry about sharing your hosting with other sites.


    Cheers,
    Mark
  • As per my opinion we should take hosting on those site where we did purchase a domain, Similarly I used Godaddy is best choice, And they offered affordable hosting.
  • If your using WordPress you can get WordPress managed hosting.

    WordPress Hosting & Managed WordPress Hosting | WP Engine
    https://getflywheel.com/
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  • 59

    I have a wordpress site that is doing well but is getting really low speed scores. I put in a CDN with Amazon but that only moved the speed a little. I am wondering if my hosting setup is the problem. I am running this as an addon domain with Bluehost. Is that the problem? Would it run faster as a primary domain? Is Bluehost the problem?