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Hello,
My website has been terribly slow for the past two days and I don't know what to do. Hostgator has not replied to my support ticket for two days. My website's speed seems to be fluctuating as it is normal one minute and then suddenly starts becoming slow again. Sometimes it will not load at all.
On the day that i noticed it was slow is the same day that I had to restore a blog post that was in the trash. I have no idea how my blog post ended up being deleted to the trash. Could restoring that blog post have something to do with why my website has been slow.
I have also recently started using YOAST SEO to optimize my blog post. I have always had YOAST installed in wordpress but never really did anything with it. I thought that the plugin could be causing my website to slow but I have since deactivated YOAST but still having problems with my site.
I'm not getting any help from Hostgator and this really makes me want to switch to another host. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Here is my website
Hi,
besides possible performance problems from hostgator, you can check your page performance with several websites:
http://gtmetrix.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/And I´m sure there are even more out there...
They will give you suggestions how to make your website faster.Big points are usually:
optimizing images (you can use online services like http://www.compressor.io, http://www.kraken.io, http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/, tinypng.com,... for that) and
using a caching plugin (like wp-supercache or w3total cache).If you want to find out the impact plugins have on your website load times you can use the p3-profiler plugin.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/There are also plugins to check your database and help optimize it (like wp-optimize), but be very careful with that and always make sure you have an up-to-date backup of your website.
Thank you so much Christopher. I used the tools that you provided. I had to deactivate a couple of plugins and that seemed to get the site back to normal.
Thanks!
Had the same problem with one of my Hostgator accounts for nearly the entire month of December. Just started suddenly one day, sites getting slower and slower, then the cherry on top was too-frequent-for-comfort errors of "Gateway timeout: cannot connect to remote host". I would receive those errors after about 4-6 page visits while working on sites, and it happened with every single site on that account, and the timeouts wouldn't resolve for 10-15 minutes at a time... not great when you're trying to build a new site for a client (a brand new site, with no plugins, so nothing to optimize).
For two weeks, Hostgator support kept telling me to optimize my WordPress installations (never mind the fact that all of them had been on there for nearly 2 years without any problems, and none of the sites had been updated within the prior month). We won't go into how it took them 5 days to respond to my initial trouble ticket about this, and we also won't go into how this problem was across the board on one account, but non-existent on a separate Hostgator account with almost double the number of WordPress installations on it.
Their response delay gave me enough time to bite the bullet and go back to Media Temple, whom I'd left almost 3 years ago because of dissatiscation with the degrading response times I was getting with their Grid service at the time. Since, they've made improvements across the board to the Grid service, I moved about 5 websites from the recalcitrant Hostgator account and wonder of wonders, those websites stopped having the slow response and timeout problems, and weren't triggering any resource usage flags at MT.
Even after moving some sites from the problematic Hostgator account to the working Hostgator account and having performance improve with that move as well, they never once looked deeper than problems with my sites. One tech, after 5 weeks, finally recommended that I look at the high number of processes that were having to be killed on the server. Problem is, I don't have access to any data that tells me that something one my sites was running into CPU usage problems... I was repeatedly checking resource usage graphs and reports that I could access via cPanel, and never once did they report what this one tech was telling me.
There was one IMAP account that looks like it started hanging, but that email address had been active on the server for well over a year. Not sure if there was a client update or a server update that caused it, but it looks like my clients Apple Mail client was getting stuck in not closing connections after downloading messages (we won't go into how he's not interested in switching off Apple Mail despite me hounding him about it for several years) 🙂
I had him switch from auto-polling to manual polling, and after 4-5 days the problems with slow response and gateway timeouts seem to have stopped... but it shouldn't have taken 5 weeks to figure out that that might have been a cause in the first place, especially when it hadn't been an issue for the previous year.
That said, I'm still going to move a few more accounts to Media Temple, and shut myself down to one Hostgator acct rather than two, and I'm definitely canceling my affiliate account with HG, after this bad experience and an earlier one when I gave them specs on a big website and was told that one type of account could handle it, only to have that site hit all resource limits and have limit locks put on it within 6 hours of landing on that server... on a Friday night (I say this because I had unfortunately learned earlier in the year that HG pretty much doesn't respond to trouble tickets on weekends anymore... at least none that I've submitted since the end of 2013).
That incident led to me moving that site to Siteground over that weekend, which led me to a month-long torture-fest with Siteground, which has forever soured me on trusting their server performance. Their tech support is responsive and pleasant, just a bit restricted in what they can do at times. For smaller sites, I'm guessing they're great... but I won't be going back there either.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkSummer,
I am hearing more and more horror stories like yours when it comes to Hostgator. There customer service is horrible and I can't afford to lose the time that I lost this past few days. I just wish Hostgator would admit when there are problems on their end instead of blaming customer's site optimization. I've heard some good things about A Small Orange Hosting which I am considering moving to.
I just need a reliable host and not have to worry about servers being down and horrible customer service.
They didn't used to have service this uneven and performance this spotty. Everything points to the decline happening after they were bought by EIG, and had their data center moved to Provo UT. Before that move, I was getting really fast website response times, and relatively prompt tech support responses, and responses that weren't canned for the first 3 questions.
When I was previously with Media Temple, their tech support seemed to always be on the ball. I just couldn't get past how long it was taking initial DNS lookups to resolve when going to sites on their old Grid Service setup. That problem seems to be gone now, thank goodness. I just hope them being bought by GoDaddy last year doesn't result in any GoDaddy-like hosting service fiascos, LOL.
And I also seem to have spoken too soon about this problem at Hostgator being resolved. After 4 days of normal behavior, the sites on that problematic server are experiencing the gateway timeout error again. Nothing changed on my end, since this entire week, I've been working on sites that aren't on that account.
Maybe it's time to open a second MT account and move everything off HG.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkMany offerings from EIG seem to be inconsistent.
I've been considering SiteGround for a project.
Any experience with them?
Choose your next site design from over 350 Genesis themes.
[ Follow me: Twitter ] [ Follow Themes: Twitter ] [ My Favourite Webhost ]My experience in October with Siteground and a high-traffic, high volume website (database is over 120Mb, 10 years worth of content) was subpar. Results did not live up to prior hype and praise/anecdotes from other web pros. However, with a smaller website your mileage may vary.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkI hope your experience continues to be good... I did some digging to find out more about them, and found that EIG had bought A Small Orange as well, same time they'd bought Hostgator (July 2012). Seems like EIG also just bought Arvixe back in November.
http://www.webhostingchoose.com/business/all-endurance-international-web-hosting-brands/
And yes, I'm in the slow process of moving some 40 domains off of 2 Hostgator accounts/servers, never to return.
(my previous version of this post seems to have been eaten by the filters again)
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkMy reply with a link keeps getting eaten by filters. Hopefully it will show up in a few days, but short version is that I was doing some digging on A Small Orange to see what they have, and discovered they were bought by EIG in July 2012, same time they bought Hostgator.
I hope your hosting experience with them continues to be good.
EIG also just bought Arvixe back in November, so that downward slide may be imminent as well.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark
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