Following a request for faster performance, I have taken out a new account in February, and have been experimenting with it. It is called a Virtual Private Server (VPS).
When you look at the range of hosting services available they start off as shared hosting where there may be several hundred, or even over 1000 websites all sharing the same server platform.
I am a reseller, so I purchase a block of resources on this shared platform and add websites into this system. The hosting company monitors the performance of the servers and makes sure they do not crash, or fail, or run out of hosting resources.
However this model means that while each website is physically separated from the next, you can be affected by the overall operation of the server. I know from my dealings with the hosting company that they are pretty good at managing this, and it is very rare for a website or server to go down. If it does, by the time I have alerted them, they are generally already aware of the situation and have some remedial process underway.
I spent a lot of time in January and February trying to identify why some sites ran more slowly than others, and what could be done to speed them up. I have a series of support threads in this area with the hosting company. Your sites have many local tweaks on them to help them to perform well. But sometimes there are server related issues where a site might be slowing down, or less responsive because of something else going on, on the server. You are also spread across many different servers, not everyone is on the same one.
There are also some complexities with the caching system used and what it does with code used by the website. Sometimes deleting the server side cache (Stackcache in your dashboard) can clear things up.
Checking out some competition
I took out some hosting with another UK based company in early February to establish if we were seeing “good performance” compared to a competitor. I tried several sites there and recorded the difference in speeds. It turned out that where we are now for this class of hosting is very good. The cache provided by the server is also effective in giving each site an edge over competitive shared hosting.
The Next Level
When you look at hosting plans, the next level up from shared hosting is Virtual Private Hosting. This is where an instance of the operating system runs on platform where you have finite resources such as processor cores, memory, disk space, disk input/output and network bandwidth. Unlike the shared model, you are not sharing this model with anyone unless you choose to do so. There are several levels of performance, and you can scale up (or down) as required.
Wingrove-Media VPS
I have taken out a relatively small configuration, but it is almost as expensive as the shared reseller hosting on an annual basis. It is based on a two core processor, 50GB disk space, 100Mb/s network speed and 2GB of memory. I have been running several websites in this space over the past 3 weeks.
Site access speeds are notably faster, editing is much faster, which tends to indicate that the Divi editing system is quite processor and memory intensive on the shared platform.
I can scale this area up from 2 processors to 10 processors and over 400GB of space 1000Mb/s port speed at £250 per month! Well that is a long way off. How this all goes is highly dependent on people moving their sites into this space.
For now this platform is available for the next 3 months and under review. I will provide more information on pricing and terms and conditions a little later.
If you are concerned about your site speed, and would like it all to run faster, I can demonstrate the benefits by moving your website into my VPS account for 2 weeks. Contact me for more details.
Slow site? Check your browser
One notable thing I did find out during this exercise was that Chrome was not as fast as I expected it to be. I ran multiple tests by working my way from left to right loading the top level pages on a website, and timing how long it took to load every page at the top level. I did this with Chrome (my normal go to browser), Microsoft Edge and Firefox. Chrome produced consistently lower results than Firefox and Microsoft Edge. (This was on a Windows 10 Professional platform).
I have started to use Microsoft Edge as my go to browser, and this has increased editing and browsing times. I would also add here unlike your Chrome Browser I have a few plugins loaded into mine, so these may have contributed to slowing it down. I did try unloading most of them, it was still slower than MS Edge and Firefox. That all said, I would recommend giving them a try. Unlike MS Explorer, which did have issues in compatibility with Web Standards, MS Edge seems to work fine.