Hello,
I would like any opinions on the page loading speed of Hostgator if any body has any websites being hosted on them. Any other companies which are good with a good speed.
Thanks
Website’s page speed is depends on different things but a good web hosting server can increase your site’s loading time. I don’t have personal experience about but some of my friends’ sites are hosting on their service and working well at least better than godaddy.
So go with Hostgator
Well you’d expect that given that Hostgator is a web hosting company that does domain registrations as a side business while GoDaddy is a domain registrar that does hosting as a side business.
As with all hosting providers - some people will give praise where there will be others who will slag the company off.
The best bet is to try them yourself and see if they work for you and your usage.
HostGator is an overseller. Someone around here was praising HostGator a while back and I accessed a couple sites he or she had in their signature line and they weren’t slow, but they did not load quickly. If memory serves it took about 8 seconds to load the page from the time I hit enter to when it was fully rendered in the browser. My goal is 3 seconds, and no longer than 5.
I’ve hosted on oversellers in the past and learned the hard way. There is no such thing as unlimited resources! A host cannot possibly offer “unlimited” disk space or “unlimited” data transfer. Do a little searching about oversellers and people who know about what makes a good web host will tell you to steer clear. Even if the service is acceptable when you sign up (as it was when I first started with Go Daddy), over time the quality of the service deteriorates as more and more customers get stuffed onto the server lured by the promise of “unlimited” resources.
Is it possible there is an overseller out there that doesn’t overload their server? Are all the clients going to play nice and not try to use all the “unlimited” resources made available to them? Unlikely. More often than not, the server is going to get overloaded and web pages will load more and more slowly. Go Daddy was not fast when I started hosting on it, but it was acceptable for the cheap price. Over time, the server got slower and slower. Forum page loads were taking 20 - 30 seconds during peak times of the day (late afternoon to early evening) and eventually I could not take any more so I found a real host. The difference was like night and day.
If I see the word “unlimited” when it comes to limited resources, I immediately disqualify the host from consideration. Quality is what matters to me, not quantity.
Where a host claims unlimited resources in one area all it means is that the limits they have in other areas will restrict your use as much as they need to. Most who offer unlimited disk space are generally more restrictive than those who offer 100Gb+ disk space for example as with an unlimited disk space account the other restrictions will usually make it impossible to use anywhere near that much space.
As long as the hosting provider monitors the usage on each server and moves sites as the usage starts to get too high there is effectively no limit as if all their customers suddenly doubled their usage they’d simply need twice as many servers to host them on. In the unlikely event that would happen their prices would then need to double however there is unlikely to be a real increase on average as long as they keep obtaining new smaller sites.
Thre are many different types of hosting package and shared hosting offered by places like HostGator are aimed at people whose hosting doesn’t need much in the way of resources in the first place. HostGator does offer an upgrade path though because they also offer VPS and dedicated hosting. Some other big providers of shared hosting only offer shared hosting so that when you outgrow their hosting you have to move elsewhere.
Most people complaining about having ongoing issues with their site have outgrown their current hosting but are often unprepared to pay for the resources that they really need. These are the sorts of customers that no hosting provider would want in the first place.
Well, based on my own experience with quite a few the big “unlimited hosts” that got bashed earlier, I suppose I should agree with the overall assessment, that things usually do go south with them. However, not all hosts were like Godaddy. Some were better, and some, including Hostgator, have done a great job overall as far as I’m concerned.
Big hosts will find it hard to be perfect. Hosting is a lot about customer service, and even if the owner/management is very much committed to quality and performance, employees will differ a lot, and you can’t have a team of all-perfect employees when there are hundreds of thousands of them.
I’m with Host Gator and they told me that the acceptable average is 10! And I’m on a dedicated server. Not happy. Can you tell me where you went?
10 is not an acceptable average, unless you’ve got 10 CPUs or cores. Do you know how many processor cores your server has?
Obviously, you are going to know if your server is slow or not. On a dedicated box, there should be no issues with overselling because the only client on the server is you.
I am going to guess you have a lot of traffic. I don’t know what kind of investigation you’ve done so far to determine why your load average is so high. That would be the first course of action before jumping to a new host. Sometimes an inefficiently-written script can push the average high. Things like Wordpress, for instance, are great apps with a lot of features but under the hood, they are badly written and very bloated.
Are you using any PHP accelerators? I’ll respond to your private message.
10 is not an acceptable average, unless you’ve got 10 CPUs or cores.
I think the 10 were seconds to load a page forum, rather than server load.
Now 10 seconds for a forum page is not something to write home about, but depending on the number and quality of mods installed, hardware specifications and also on the traffic levels, it might be a fair value. Generally speaking, when you have a dedicated server, the performance depends a lot on your own usage and less on your host, as opposed to a shared hosting environment, where the host’s ability and willingness to stop abusers from taking over the server’s resources can be the main factor influencing performance.
Godaddy is slow as molasses - their shared hosting at least. Dreamhost… it’s been a while since I last used them, but while I used them (1 year) they were not consistently fast.
The sad fact is that many hosting companies these days still don’t provide good speed. IMHO, some are unacceptable speed wise, even for a hobby site. This is become a bit more important than years ago, because Google puts some weight on how fast a website loads, and slowness can end up costing not only through frustrating your site’s visitors, but by affecting your site’s SEO.
Thanks for all inputs.