What to do, if my hosting is slow

What an amazing and simple question, right?

You should understand, that term “hosting” refers to a specific computer, specific hardware, set of software applications and a ton of different technologies, that glue this all together. You pay for this service. Company, which provides you this service – pays for the hardware and software and keeps the margin as profit. That’s all fair and good.

Hosting company does the job providing promised services and you pay their bills.

Problems start, when one of the parties becomes greedy. You may want to pay as less as possible. Hosting company may try to put as much customers on a single server, as possible and squeeze every bit of it out. If both parties are doing the same – you pay very cheap price and hosting is slow – that is, again, quite fair situation.

But sometimes customer is eager to pay, but receives service using old hardware. Sometime you receive good service, but your page is so popular, that (I am talking about shared hosting) your page is using too much resources, unfair part of server resources. How can you tell – who to blame?

Well, this is a complex, but not too complicated question. Here are few tips about what to do:

• install WordPress and use WordPress hosting benchmark plugin – test your CPU of your hosting server. Low scores usually identify old or generally slow CPU.
• check with your hosting company support, if your account is being throttled due to high resource usage or due to other reasons (e.g. terms of service)

If your hosting CPU score is low – the best solution is to ask your hosting company to transfer your account to a faster server. If that is not possible – change your hosting provider.

If your hosting CPU score is good (let’s say 7,5+) and if your page is popular and is using a lot of resources – you should look into caching and CDN. A very good reading material for WordPress optimization can be found in Tom’s blog. Bad code can also drain server resources. Bad code is always your responsibility.

Remember – fast CPU is an major element for your webpage speed. Talk to your hosting provider – some may help quite easily, for some it might be more challenging. If you pay descent price – negotiate. If you are low-price paying customer – consider paying more or accept what you get – fast hardware comes with the high price, there’s no magic.