Choosing the right hosting provider for your website is HUGELY important and probably the most important part of your website. Like a house, if you don’t put in the right foundations in at the start then your house is going to start getting problems and it just won’t be a good construction. Hosting is the same, choose a hosting provider that is below par and your website will see the effect. In this blog post I discuss why I had no choice but to leave my hosting provider.
Constant terrible performance
I am quite a loyal person, especially to those with good principles. As all hosting companies seem to appear the same on the service the hosting company I decided to engage with drew me in by suggesting it offered 100% wind powered hosting. Great! I thought, a company that totally agrees with my principles of looking after the environment but at times it felt like the wind wasn’t blowing.
Wind blown out of my sails.
Again and again I contacted the live chat and they attempted to improve performance. Albeit it , sometimes they did succeed in improving the speed from 8 seconds a page to about 3 seconds but I just wasn’t happy, “nobody has time for that!” we as consumers are becoming more and more inpatient. The final straw came when i did a speed test on pingdom and found this…
18 seconds to connect to the server
Totally unacceptable! I might as well not even had a website with a load time that bad, then to connect to another page would consistently take longer than 10 seconds!!! Very very bad!
A bad workman blames his tools
To rub salt into the speed wound they kept blaming the fact I used WordPress for my websites CMS.
WOO OOO WOO OOO !!! Get your warning sirens out!
If a hosting provider EVER blames WordPress for slow hosting then you know you have found a hosting provider that are below par. The reason I was experiencing bad loading times was due to their servers but they were trying to pass the buck to a third-party CMS that is actually used by the vast majority of websites today but, luckily, I knew that and so I wasn’t being fobbed off! WordPress Themes and Plugins can cause issues I don’t deny but not 18 seconds of problem. Below is the start of the final conversation I had : –
It wasn’t the theme, it was the host and so unfortunately I was forced to look elsewhere for my hosting. It was a shame as I had been hosting with FatCow for over 2 years and their principles of sustainable hosting really impressed me but their technical ability to run database driven websites just wasn’t good so I looked at WordPress’ recommended hosting providers and chose one of them.I guess you can see why I changed my hosting provider now…
Moving sometimes IS the answer
Now I find my website is consistently faster with a max load time of 3 seconds a page which is what i expect and more importantly, what my visitors expect when they visit.
If you are experiencing slow loading times go to tools.pingdom.com…
if you see the first bar http://www.yoururl.com ( this is the initial ping to the server ) is taking the longest to load , longer than 2 seconds then you need to consider changing your hosting provider. For a good idea of the best hosting providers that will work well with WordPress check out this website here : –
Visit Recommended Hosting Providers
Is it hard to transfer?
If you think it is quite hard to transfer your website to a new hosting provider you would be quite wrong. In the near future I will give a post on a couple of ways on how to go about completing this and remember, stay loyal when required not if you and your website is suffering because of it.