Hi, Can somebody please lend some advise regarding hosting and speed I have a large wordpress website with around 100,000 pages Disk space on server: 5GB Mysql space: 300Mb My host said a large number of posts will slow down the site which is understandable. I currently use shared hosting and it's slow as a turtle. Some folks suggested I get a dedicated server but it's off my budget to be honest. I've optimized the site with Cache and compression + plus other optimizations quite a bit. I would like to know if I can host my website in the "cloud" which seems to be a cheaper option. Is this possible ? Will hosting on the cloud speed my site up and remove the load from the shared server ? Also most of the disk space is used up by images. Is it possible to have the images hosted on a "cloud server" and remove them from my shared hosting server to free up disk space ? Finally my host Hostgator said "that in most cases the current production version of Mysql on our shared servers will have significant delays querying databases with over 100MB of data" If someone could please advise what would be the best path to take ( cost effective ), I'd really appreciate it! Thank you
To be honest, HostGator is not the best host. They used to be good, but were bought by a company called EIG, which is well known for running hosts into the ground. A decent VPS or cloud server should work fine for you. Your disk space is not the issue, so don't worry about that. 5GB is a relatively small site, in the grand scheme of things. The problem is likely CPU or RAM usage, which a VPS or cloud server will take care of for you. Remember though, that if you intend on running a control panel (i.e. cPanel), it is not free like it is with shared hosting, and you have to have considerably more RAM in your VPS to run it. 1+GB of RAM is the recommendation. You are very likely to not need a dedicated server.
I use Hostgator on a big site of mine and they are good, I do pay for a dedicated server though, as far as their shared and VPS servers those are not nearly as powerful as their dedicated.
A lot of people keep saying that, but it just isn't true once you take everything into consideration. You have cPanel (and a VPS large enough to run it), softaculous, backups, site-building software, and whatever else you might get on shared hosting. You purchase those on a VPS and it is quite costly. Sure, you can say you don't need any of those, but then it isn't a 1:1 comparison. So no...VPS and shared hosting are not the same price at all.
To be perfectly honest with you, 'cloud' is just a variation of shared hosting that's hosted on a cluster of servers that can fail over with storage being SAN based (in most cases). If you're already experiencing slowdown in terms of page load and Hostgator's telling you that databases over 100MB are slow to query, you may or may not experience the same (or slower) performance in the cloud seeing as the storage there has latency time (even if minimal) because it's SAN. That being said, of course, my judgement may be off because Hostgator made that claim and they've since declined in quality. In any case, Hostgator is the last place you should go if you have a heavy wordpress site. Their shared hosting is good if you want to host a couple HTML pages. Beyond that, they'll almost never work out. What you should consider, at this point, is a VPS. You don't need a dedicated server. 5GB of space is negligible and a 300MB database size is going to perform perfectly fine. You don't need an SSD VPS either, regular storage will do just fine. Why pay premium for speed you won't need? Granted the cost to invest in a VPS is going to be higher. You're looking at, at least, $15/month in a cPanel license. You only have one blog right now and I would assume you're capable of installing Wordpress yourself so you don't really need to spend extra on Softaculous. All it does is skip a few trivial steps and is not worth a monthly recurring cost. Backups are not really included on most shared hosts so either way, that's not a cost you should be factoring in. With a 5GB size, mostly comprised of images, you could use either your personal computer or a different free cloud storage service (like Dropbox) for backups. Beyond that, you'll need to get used to managing a the VPS, but that's not really the world's most difficult thing to do. If anything, it'll be good in the long run. The VPS itself should cost between $15-$30 per month or more/less depending on what specs you pick and what provider you go for. Whether you get managed or self-managed, etc. As a rule of thumb, if you plan to put cPanel on your VPS, you most certainly will need 512MB RAM minimum. Going with a reputable provider for 1GB RAM or more should cost you the above price range on a monthly basis. Images, yes, you can host them on a 'cloud' server, sure. The only one that comes to my mind is a combination of Amazon's E3 Storage and Cloudfront. Depending on how much storage you use and how many pageviews, etc you serve your costs will vary. They have a calculator on their site that you can use to estimate your monthly cost. Although, to be honest, I would assume you don't need that at this point in time. Hosting those images on a VPS and letting, say, nginx do the job that normally Apache would, will be a good enough optimization for you. If you need further advice and help on optimization tips for when you're up and running with a VPS or on what provider to choose or anything server related in general, feel free to PM me
To be honest, you might want to try a company that specializes in wp hosting - like wpengine.com. Unless you are a sys admin yourself and can handle and maintain a vps, like the others have suggested.
As from our professional experience, it is recommended to move to the good VPS plan, as your site is "eating" high resources. The issue mostly generated by the large amount of MySQL queries most probably. Let us know what location preference and hosting features you'd like to have and we can help you in this. Cheers!
Hi, I'm assuming that most of the load is coming from your database so you could also consider moving your database to another server. There are a number of Database hosting providers to choose from and moving the DB should get Host Gator of your back. The other option is to completely move to a VPS provider as others have suggested.
Consider advice from Taggr too, as having separate servers (or at least vps) for your site and database will significantly improve speed and performance.
I wrote an article on this a while back: http://www.bitronictech.net/knowledgebase/10077/Make-your-WordPress-Blog-Faster.html The long and short of it is that with 100,000 pages and 300MB MySQL, leveraging a plugin like WC3 Total Cache is of tantamount important. As aforementied by other users you may want to take a look at your server architecture. I didn't see you mention how much traffic your site gets, but if it is on an overloaded node at HostGator (EIG) that could be your problem. HostGator was a pretty good company until they were sold to EIG. Also, if you are going to stick with shared hosting, find a host that supports either APC, xCache or eAccelerator and is running PHP in DSO or fCGI. This will allow you to cache the database in RAM, thus highly improving the speed of your site. If you are running a really high traffic site WC3 Total Cache and a CDN/CloudFlare type solution alone might not solve your problems. Getting a VPS on a fast network with ample resources and combining it with an Nginx/PHP-FPM architecture, combined with the aforementioned measures, definitely will make your site lightning fast!
Interesting article, recommended to read. Here's the link to another useful information how to optimize WordPress via Apache handlers, mainly for VPS or dedicated server owners.