High Quality Hosting and Page Speed Posted Nov 27, 2011 by Stefan Caunter

Allan has written some slides on Accelerating Wordpress, which we'll post here after he presents them at the Toronto Affiliate Summit Meetup on November 29th 2011. We usually edit each other's stuff, and I started in on the shared vs. dedicated hosting slide. Since we do Scalable Hosting, with our Origin Web Cluster, I thought I'd publish the overview here.

On shared, virtual hosting environments, those cheap, $5 hosting plans, someone else's busy site will, by definition, adversely affect your site. Overloaded virtual servers with hundreds of sites cannot sustain bursts of valuable traffic, or even get pages built and sent out in a reasonable amount of time.

Network and disk throughput are often poor to terrible with shared hosting, failing to reach even the basic 5Mbps download speed for the average US internet user. Top download averages are now at 30Mbps for Japan, Korea and Hong Kong. High speed internet is legislatively mandated in Scandinavia. Your hosting and CDN needs to be on a 1Gbps line for your target market of well provisioned end users.

You need to distribute and optimize your site's "objects", from the base html, to the scripts and css, to the images and video. Insist on redundant Tier1 high quality network transit. Find a hosting company with properly tuned memory, disks, storage, servers, databases, and web servers. You don't get what you pay for, you get what you get. Find out what you are getting with your hosting! Clustering and pooling of server resources can dramatically expand capacity and throughput. Is the PHP engine distributed on multiple servers for maximum horsepower? Are PHP processes isolated from web server processes? Are web server processes optimized for concurrency and maximum throughput? Can your host proxy intelligently to maximize efficient delivery of content and leverage existing site logic?