I recently signed up with www.dayanahost.com but it seems about 40 to 50% of the time when I go to the domain home page of my sites, it takes between 5 to 20 seconds for the site to load up 100%. In other words there is a lot of 'hang time'. That hang time sucks because usually people don't wait for a page to load. My ISP is verizon, and I use DSL for internet. So how do I know what is making things so slow... is it my host, the Wordpress 1.5 blog I am using, my own Verizon ISP, or something else? I tried tracert but don't know how to interpret what it told me... thoughts?
Try doing a reverse IP lookup. There are some free online ones that will tell you how many domains are on your particular IP. If I can find the one I've used in the past I'll post the link here. I had a slow site back when I was using other web hosts (shared server), until I found out that they were running over 400 domains on my IP, god knows how many they had running in total on the server. They shall remain nameless, but suffice to say they were a major UK web host. You could also try doing a ping test to see how long each step is taking to respond. They are fairly easy to understand but a good host will probably have switched off ping responses from their server. To test your ISP, try to find a good bandwidth test online, there are loads out there that will tell you how good your connection is.
These guys do a reverse IP that shows all the domains on that IP: http://www.whois.sc/reverse-ip/ but there is another free, better one I'll keep looking for you. here it is: http://whois.webhosting.info/
LOL... makes me think twice about following that link in your signature On my server, I noticed that certain processes were slowing things down - like updating the locate database. Streamlining my processes dramatically improved performance consistency. There are a lot of free monitoring services out there and many of them provide stats like page load time. I would suggest using at least two for a week and seeing what your page load times look like. Also, I've seen some problems with page design that will slow down download times. Oh - and by the way, I personally NEVER click on any tinyurl link. I like to know where I'm going. You're better off by putting the full link there. If you are using an affiliate link through tinyurl, I'm pretty sure that's not allowed.
Hmm. You are paying $15 per year and you want an excellent host? Think about the logistics of that. The guy gets about $1.25 per month from you. Lets say his dedicated server costs him $150 per month. Thats 120 sites that he has to have running just to cover that cost. If he can get another 400 sites on the server he can bring in $500 per month. And he is hoping that none of them use the full bandwidth and disk space. This is called overselling. If you want a good fast host you might have to pay a little more.
Riziko I agree with you. I have an account with superb internet who is much better.. but I went with dayanahost because I did not feel like being charged 100 per month for 6 new domains especially considering it will take much time for them to be recognized with search engines etc. and to get the sites designed. It just seemed like a better deal... I could always upgrade them later to a better dedicated plan with dayanahost. http://www.dayanahost.com/cpanel.dedicated.cfm
The upgrade sounds like a good idea when your sites get going. BTW Those dedicated servers seem a bit expensive for what you get. www.servermatrix.com has some good dedicated servers (unmanaged).