Category: News

I currently use two reseller accounts located at different hosting companies. This was a deliberate choice to ensure that if something went wrong at Hosting Company A then I could switch to Hosting Company B.

As with all major decisions like this I did some extensive testing during the approval window before making the commitment.

Some six months later I can see a significant difference between Hosting A and Hosting B. One is faster than the other. The slower one also seems to be subject to some variance on performance. There are many reasons why this may be the case, some I know about, others may remain a mystery.

As I am working mostly in the new hosting space I tend to notice this before anyone else does. Those that have hosted with me for over a year will know that I pulled all of my sites out of HostPapa for this reason. The UK performance was very poor following some changes made by HostPapa to the MySQL database server. It never got any better after the changes and following some extended dialogue with the hosting company, I decided to move everyone out.

Towards the end of this year I will review things again. I tend to have several support cases going on with my hosting suppliers, there have been several events over the past month which indicate the slower of the two hosting packages I use have been experiencing technical problems.

One issue was caused by the hosting company deliberately disabling the newsletter plugin on a site. I only found this out after 4 hours of trying things. Only when I moved the site in question to another location did I find out it all worked. Following a rather heated technical support exchange and asking them to check for certain things, they found an automated function kicking in and causing the problem. I frequently find that the 1st level support people, and sometimes the 2nd level too, know less about there systems than I can ascertain looking from the outside. I would hope for better, but this seems to be the case in many areas outside of IT too.

It is quite likely I may move around 15 sites to alternative hosting later this year or early next year if things do not improve. As things stand right now, all of the sites are up and running, a small number of them are running slower than the rest.

If you are concerned about the performance of your site, please contact me, I can then check it, and take it up with the hosting company. Do however bear in mind that the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that the hosting vendors offer is something like 99.9% systems availability. That .1% equates to 525.6 minutes of downtime per year or 8.8hrs. As far as I am aware both hosting suppliers are currently operating within those levels.

While working my way around all of the sites over September I have added in Social Media Feather, which is an excellent plugin which is not too difficult to set up. In all cases I have this set up, (if you cannot see it please contact me), it appears as a set of icons below your posts and pages.

If you also have a Facebook account and/or Twitter, then I have added these in too.

The major benefit of this plugin is that it supports a lot of social groups and is easy to configure. Once set up, your specific content can be shared through the social media group; that is right down to the page and/or post level. So any campaigns you choose to run can now be more easily shared by people.

You can see these icons at the bottom of this post.

Memory Management

All WordPress installations are set up to run in 64MB of memory by default. I found one case where the memory allocated through the hosting company (apparently it was a glitch), was only set to 32MB.  I have added a plugin which can be configured to increase this memory. All sites are now working with a minimum allocation of 128MB, and in some cases 256MB.

With one of the reseller accounts I use, there is little difference because the hosting is fast anyway, in the other there is a small improvement of speed. Largely because the memory allocated was small before it was extended.

The Plugin is called Change Memory Limit.

Reducing the Noise

On all sites I have some security plugins which send me messages about activities on the website. These will generally tell me about login failures and other problems, as well as changes to sites. I know who the editors are and can detect activity that is outside of “normal activity”. For the most part, this is hackers trying to get into a site. The volume of traffic has got so high over the past 3 weeks I have had to go in and reduce the frequency of emails to an acceptable level. On some nights (over a 6 hour period) I would get 100+ emails advising me of failed login attempts. Each one represents many failed attempts.

It seems to be a fact of life that hacker activity is increasing. I guess we just have to accept it, and keep an eye on it. Do however maintain and change tough passwords. Remember that hackers often work to password libraries, and if you are using a simple password, then it is likely they may try to use it too.