Hello drupalers, I have a website that runs on drupal 6 and uses modules like cck, views, location, Gmap and others. The traffic to my site has significantly increased over the last half year which affected the loading speed of the pages. Right now it is hosted on a shared hosting with Godaddy and gets about 2K visitors per month. My question is whether switching to a different shared hosting company would resolve this issue, or is it time to upgrade to a vps? I have no experience managing vps and not sure how much it's gonna cost if I hire someone to manage it for me. Looking forward to your replies! Thank you.
As per your numbers: 2000k users is not a lot, and it sums up to 70 per day. even if you have a creazy peak I think that 500 users an hour should not be too much for a shared server on godaddy. I could be wrong, but I would go to different directions first: try to look for css and html validity errors on microsoft IE Developer tools, install mozilla pagespeed at getfirebug.com/downloads. another option is to install another drupal sandbox site on the same server (your account), and check for response speed. that could eliminate your assumtion (server stress) ...
I would upgrade to a VPS.. Shared hosting for Drupal sites is definitely do-able but you want the speed of same server MySQL access. You can also check out AN Hosting, they offer shared hosting with same server MySQL albeit with a 32mb PHP memory limit (probably not enough for your needs!).
I have analyzed the pages with firebug and it gives a score of 80/100 - the only things that are missing are gzip compression and cache expiry date. Do you think these could affect the loading significantly? Google webmaster site performance tool shows an average of 4.2 seconds for pages that have both the Gmap and Views modules displayed... not sure how accurate that is though. It is already disabled. In fact, the site is working fine for me... The reason that I am concerned is because I keep receiving complaints from my visitors saying the site is loading slowly. Yes, makes sense. Right now there are up to two views loaded on one page - one view for the map and the other one for the listings... Do you run any drupal sites on vps? Thank you for your replies!
What's your URL? Try turning on devel module; it will show you what queries are being run so you can look at the slow ones