Forum Moderators: phranque
I use that page often, maybe 20 times a day, and am a bit concerned about how often the page refuses to load or takes an age to load.
What shoud I expect from a hosting company? 100% each and every day with an immediate page load? Less? How much less? What's your view?
First one must be absolutely, positively sure it's the hosting and not your Internet access. Sure you may be paying for premium service but it's not always what it should be. It comes and goes with the day, and usage on that backbone. The quickest way to tell this is prepare several tests against other sites - Google for example. When it bogs down, immediately request pages via browser, compare ping times.
Another way to tell is comparing load times using one of those "site optimizer" sites. The real advantage here is you get a benchmark from a third party that is not on your bandwidth, takes "you" out of the equation.
It may also be something in your system, compare speeds between browsers.
If it's shared hosting, all bets are off (IMO.) You get what you pay for, and any site on the shared box that bogs down the server is going to affect you. Not a thing you can do about this, and even less you can do to debug it.
The best I got out of shared services was 80%, with the problems in the other 20% ranging from slow loads to complete outage. But I really couldn't blame the host because shared hosting . . . is what it is.
If it's a dedicated server, you now have control over your environment and you will see a lot of these problems melt away. We've been on a dedi almost two years. I sit here all day long (and many times, most of the night.) Even graphically heavy pages load in 20 seconds or under, so I would say you should expect 98% 24/7, or find another dedicated server. Our only real downtimes . . . were due to something we screwed up. :-)
Even this is subject to "you get what you pay for." Go with the low end economy dedis, with slower processors and less RAM, you may see some performance issues. A VPS, in reality, is still a "shared server" in the way I describe it above. Anything the that the other VPS's on that machine do to bog it down will drag you with them.
any specifics in this thread will be edited or deleted accordingly.
as you were...
