Hostgator

[Proclaimer]

Just a heads up if you have noticed that the site is running slower. The host provider, Hostgator, sent me an email some time back saying they were upgrading the server. Great I thought. After the upgrade, all database driven sites slowed down considerably. I noticed it, so did other people who use other sites, and at least one person on Heaven Net noticed it and reported the issue to me.

If you have noticed that the site has slowed down, I would love to hear from you. Make a post here.

Below I will paste in the dialogue I am having with Hostgator.

[Proclaimer]

ME
==

Is there anyway that my server can be made faster. It is just plain too slow and have done everything possible with caching etc to make the sites faster. There comes a time when it is realised that it is my Hostgator server or database server that is slow. Even Google Page Speed reports that the server is slow. I have noticed too after much googling the problem that others have had the same issues after this so-called upgrade.

Ever since the upgrade some months back, all the database driven sites on my server have slowed down painfully and my clients have noticed it and complain about it.

You told me it was an upgrade and so I let my customers know that the servers should speed up due to an upgrade. I was left embarrassed when all the sites slowed down. The only ones that are fast are the ones that do not use a database.

Can this be fixed or do I need to look for another host provider?

[Proclaimer]

HOSTGATOR
=========

Hello,

I understand you are concerned with the responsiveness of your web sites. I logged into the server and checked its status. I could find no obvious errors that would impact your site. I then checked your Word Press installation and saw that although the caching was enabled, the configuration was less than optimal.

Caching Plugin:  WP Super Cache (Active)
Caching Enabled: Yes   Recommended
Browser Cache:   No        Yes

Rewrite Mode:    No        Yes
PHP Mode:        Yes       No
Legacy Mode:     No        No

Cache Users:     No        No
Compression:     Yes       Yes
Cache Expiry:    1800 s    3600 s

I then profiled your site using GTMetrix and found that your site loads 44 elements and took 13.75 seconds to load. The score were just about average.

In general, there are some areas in which your site could be improved. If you look over the GTMetrix analysis, under the scores there are four tabs. The first two tabs show the areas that need improvement. If you click on the blue links for each area, you will see specific recommendations and the percent improvement you would see by optimizing that area. Finally, the third tab contains a timeline which shows the time needed by each individual element of your site to load.

I saw that you did not have gzip compression enabled. This is a very simple thing to do and is very effective. The text files on your site can be compressed o a small fraction of their original size before they are downloaded. A smaller file downloads much more quickly. This page explains how to add the proper directives to your .htaccess file. http://gtmetrix.com/enable-gzip-compression.html

You should also consider adding 'expires headers' to your .htaccess file. This directive tells you browser whether to re-download an element from your site or to take the element from the browser cache. http://gtmetrix.com/add-expires-headers.html

I took the liberty of adjusting the caching configuration as well as adding the two .htaccess opimizations to your .htaccess file. I then re-profiled the site. The site now loads in 9.26 seconds. This alone represents a 33% improvement in your site load time.

This improvement was far from giving you the best site however so I explored a bit further. I installed the WordPress plugin Profiler and the output showed two other plugins  (bbpress and shortcodes-ultimate) as responsible for as much as 5 seconds of the delay in your load time.  

I noticed you have a blog using a database which loads quite nicely- in fact in less than a second. http://gtmetrix.com/reports/heavennet.net/8dAKBjAE I bring this up to point out the role that your content and plugins play in the responsiveness of your site.

Basically, while I am far from being a professional web designer, I would recommend you rethink some parts of this particular site's design. If you would like our assistance in instituting the optimization of any area, please let us know and we would be happy to help.

[Proclaimer]

ME
==

I am going to be moving away from Hostgator. You are too slow and I am getting complaints from my customers from a number of sites. Before this supposed upgrade, the server speed was great. And I have made all kinds of changes using Google Page Speed, caching and the like, (as much as I can before breaking the sites), and yes there has been some improvement, but after much work, it is still slower than it was before the upgrade.

Here are some comments and messages I have had recently:

Google Page Speed: Server is slow to respond

Chrome: Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to http://www.smartcountries.com
Chrome: Oops! Google Chrome could not find https://www.heavennet.net

Customer: “It can take up to 3 minutes waiting to submit a post in the forum”.

As I write this, the sites are not even working.

Put me back on the old server, or I am gone because slow loading sites affects my ranking in Google and this alone is a serious issue for us. I use to recommend you as the host to all our clients, I mo longer do that.

The only sites that load fast are the ones that have no database. This leads me to believe your problem is database related.

[Proclaimer]

HOSTGATOR
========

Hello,

I understand you are concerned with the performance of your accounts. I checked the two domains you mentioned in your most recent message. Both of those domains are configured to use CloudFlare as the cdn so when pages are loading, they are loading from the CloudFlare network, not the Hostgator server. If there is an error with the Hostgator server, CloudFlare will report a 504 error. To confirm the sites are actually being served from CloudFlare, I visited them with the Showip plugin for Firefox enabled (see screenshots).

Messages from Chrome of the nature you supplied, generally indicate a local connection issue. In cases of those messages, it is always advisable to immediately check the connection by using ping. https://support.hostgator.com/article….and-dig

To ensure that I had not missed anything, I also checked the server status for the hosting account. I did find that on the 20th of Feb. the server was offline for less than 10 minutes due to a scheduled maintenance. This blog post describes the details. http://forums.hostgator.com/schedul….=chakra

Unfortunately, we can not move you back to your old server. This server was in an old data center and has been decommissioned. You mentioned all the sites on your server which are database driven are performing poorly. The domain heavennet.com is one of those database driven sites. It is using WP and has 26 plugins installed. The site also has 146 active users. This site is using CloudFlare and loads in 2.13 seconds http://gtmetrix.com/reports/heavennet.com/HngSoqay By comparison, smartcountries.com, a WP blog, has 3 users and 28 plugins and loads in 7.2 seconds. http://gtmetrix.com/reports/smartcountries.com/PdIJZ47H The difference is down to the site design.

I understand this can be frustrating and even counter intuitive at times. I can only point out information that may help you to better understand the variables involved in the performance of websites. Since sites, software and the Internet are all constantly changing, it is difficult to identify permanent solutions to every problem. I would like to stress however,  that we take all your input and comments seriously and do the best we can to address each issue as it comes to our attention. Please do not stop commenting or pointing out issues with your accounts since you are more familiar with how they should be performing, you may often see trouble before it registers with our monitors.

Thank you for your patience in reading through this rather long reply and if I has not addressed any of your concerns to your satisfaction, please let us know.

[Proclaimer]

ME
==

Yes they are with Cloudflare as a strategy to speed up the sites because your servers are too slow. Google Page Speed reported the site as faster after doing so.

Thanks for your final answer.

The fact that you cannot disprove is that before the upgrade, all these sites were fast loading. After the so-called upgrade, every database driven site slowed down considerably. And it is not just me noticing this. A simple google search can see this is a common issue with Hostgator now. And I am sure you guys are aware of the problem as it is not an isolated one.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was in fact moved from my own server to some kind of shared one. How else do you explain an upgrade being slower? Anyway, one good thing was I learned a thing or two about speeding up a site. However, staying with Hostgator and speeding up the sites further would be akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

[Proclaimer]

ME
==

Further, I am trying to update one setting in the CMS of a WordPress site, and the server is so slow that it times out. Very frustrating because this is inside the CMS, where you cannot blame site design.

Take responsibility yourself instead of getting your customers to try and speed up your service for you. We pay money to be hosted with a good service. We do not pay that money to get slow service and for us to then spend weeks trying everything else to try and speed up things to counter your slow servers.

Here is the truth about Hostgator. Ask yourself, is the Internet wrong about Hostgators new so-called upgrades?

https://www.google.com/#q=Hostgator+slow+after+upgrade

[mikeboll64]

Although I barely had a clue what on earth you guys were talking about, you can't argue with that last link you provided, t8.

It seems you are definitely not alone.

Thanks for all the hard work and time and money you devote to HN.

[Proclaimer]

Thanks Mike.
I remember years ago I was hosting with a company called powweb. They were brilliant. Then they got bought out by this company called EIG and the service went downhill fast. Well the same thing has happened here. Hostgator were great. They were hosted by an IBM owned data centre. Then Hostgator were bought out by EIG. EIG moved all the clients (including me) to their inferior but more financially profitable platform in another city. They then sent out their usual email to say that the servers were being upgraded. Once the upgrade was complete, their inferior service started. I host a number of sites not just this one, and I emailed my clients to let them know the servers were being upgraded. How embarrassing for me when everything slowed down.

But I can hardly blame Hostgator for selling out because they made about 275 million and it is a business. So I am looking for a new host that is not owned by EIG. Looking at Dreamhost right now. Many say their service is good. However, I could go with them, and then EIG might buy them too, and I will once again be forced to eat their dog food.

EIG have bought out many host providers and are probably the biggest web host organisation in the world. Their strategy is simple. Buy out hosting organisations and move the clients to their inferior hosting platform. And they keep the name of the bought out service, that way they avoid renaming the service to EIG which they know would turn people away immediately. Not many are probably aware of what is going on because you need to do some research.

[mikeboll64]

Death to EIG!

What about GoDaddy?

[Proclaimer]

I tried Godaddy once and my good search ranking in Google disappeared with a number of sites. It turned out that they were heavy-handed on the security on their servers to the point that Googlebot was unable to crawl sites hosted on their platform. So I left immediately and my search ranking returned.

Since then I have looked at them as a possibility, but there is too much negative feedback on them and so am not willing to take a chance with them.

Apparently you are better off with smaller companies that care about their customers because they know customers recommend others to their service. And bigger companies take you for granted and often make changes for financial reasons that are detrimental to customers.

I think Dreamhost is small enough to care and big enough to handle robust and reliable hosting. But I have heard that they have a proprietary Control Panel which makes a proprietary backup of your database which means good if you stick with Dreamhost, but bad if you want to move because it is not so compatible.

Decisions decisions.

And just realised that I payed 2 years hosting with Hostgator a few months ago too. Bummer.

[mikeboll64]

How much would it cost for you to have your own “GoDaddy”, or “server”, or whatever?

[Proclaimer]

I am assuming that the site was fast enough before Hostgator was bought out. That being the case, the price would be at the lower end of the scale on this page. I would start with the cheapest and perhaps upgrade if necessary.
http://www.dreamhost.com/servers/vps/

The above link and the site itself is on VPS which is not your own server, but you get allocated maximum resources that never diminish.

Heaven Net use to be on shared hosting in the early days and other sites on the server would slow it down from time to time. Plus got hacked a few times from people sharing your server, (I think). So definitely out of the question.

A dedicated server is best, but too expensive for me, It starts at US $99.00 per month. But I also think it would be over-kill too. I was made redundant 3 years ago and survive on web work I get from home. Not complaining mind you. It has worked at really good. Work when I need it, and heaps of time with my kids. But have to be careful how I spend money.

I thought I had the server sorted out. Paid in advance for 2 years, but being bought out by EIG, has screwed that up somewhat.

[Proclaimer]

After much research it seems that Dreamhost is no better.

How is the site performance been the last few weeks. I haven't had any issues myself.

[mikeboll64]

I was locked out again last night.

I logged on, read a post from Nick, and made a reply to him. I hit “Submit Post”, and got a long buffer wheel, and then an error code. Error 524 I believe.

It said your server was no longer available, or having technical difficulties.

I also had 4 different Bible sites open at the same time – all of which were working just fine.

Then I tried to get on with my smart phone, and the site wouldn't load.

If I wait an hour or two, it's always back to working fine. But this is the 5th time this has happened in the last couple of months. It starts off fine, then locks up, and then is fine again the next day or whatever.

[Proclaimer]

Hmm. The site is hosted in the States, and I never get that here in NZ. What I do get is slow rendering of pages sometimes.

I am guessing that you experience this:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200171926-Error-524

And if so, it simply means that the origin server is slow. And I am not happy about that. But still looking at hosting elsewhere.

[Proclaimer]

Okay after some research I have found a new host provider. So at some stage soon, I will be moving the site to the new server. Hopefully they turn out to be good. The service was recommended by a very reputable source in the WordPress community as a great host for WordPress sites. Heaven Net is built in WordPress. In case you are not aware of what that is, it is a web framework for building sites and blogs.

[Proclaimer]

I moved one of my other sites to the new server and it rips.
http://www.smartcountries.com
This site is also more resource hungry than Heaven Net.

So the plan is to move Heaven Net over to this new server this week sometime.
This might mean downtime of perhaps 5 hours, but could be much less.
But there should be an obvious speed increase when it propagates.

[Ed J]

Thanks T8!

[seekingtruth]

T8,
I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for all your time and effort, it is appreciated.

Wm

[Author]

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