Since last Monday my site howdoidate.com has been taking too long to load (around 5 secs). Before Monday the average was 1.5 seconds. The hosting company Hostgator are blaming the Newspaper Theme but i suspect they have made a policy decision and have set the server latency longer. Google insights says the server response time is too slow at 3.2 seconds.
I’m on a VPS and use a CDN too – MaxCDN.
I’m considering changing to a new hosting company.
What is your view?
Thank you.
My server response time is typically 0.32 seconds …. and Google says that is slow ! So, 3.2 seconds for server response time (not page load time), is a bit slow by today’s standards unless it’s a $10/month account, where you can’t expect much for “on the cheap.”
Also, you can check your error log to see if you’re getting a barrage of hack attempts, brute force attempts on your admin account, scanning your directories, testing for known bad old plugins or themes … in your domain error log you should be able to see that kind of thing then block the offending IPs.
Our server went to a crawl last year with a DDOS pummeling all our ports, DNS lookups, admin logins (luckily we use ‘limit login attempts’ plugin which auto blocks the IPs from the site for bad login attempts by bots), etc. — only way to stop that was to block the entire country of Ukraine!
So, keeping an eye on your main error log periodically, even if only first of every month is super useful to have a “sense” of who is messing with you.
Thanks Chris. Well I think it’s Hostgator that’s messing with me. I heard the service has gone downhill since their takeover by Endurance in July.
I’m probably going to change to In Motion who claim a load time of less than 1 second because of various factors not least of which is their use of SSD’s.
Best wishes and thanks for the fantastic support.
Derek
