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I thought I'd ask what some folks are doing to reduce their load time and optimize performance. I'm considering changing my host and building a new server on either NGINX or Apache+Varnish.
I know many folks recommend a managed WordPress host and that's certainly a valid solution, except the price isn't in my ballpark for six different blogs.
So I would appreciate any comments about some DIY approaches. CDNs, web server tweaks, database optimization, etc. Thanks.
http://williambeem.com–William
http://williambeem.comWhat i do is host my smaller blogs on shared and my main blog on Managed Hosting.
I've tried all different types and never got it below 3 seconds until i moved to Managed.
Is Managed Hosting a provider name, or the generic term? I tried going to managedhosting.com, which forwarded me to RackSpace.com. Just want to make sure I understand where you're going.
Thanks.
–William
http://williambeem.com@Braddalton how do you test your 3 secs? Do you use this? http://www.webpagetest.org/
BTW, Brad, I don't think I have ever seen a commercial site with 3rd party ads load under 3 secs. Nicely done.
@William, id you are building a new server, does that mean a dedicated server? I assume so because you mentioned you can choose NGINX or Apache + Varnish. Either of these will give you a boost in performance. Have you considered either a Premium shared hosting solution normally $10-20 / month and they use SSD's which right away helps with page load speeds or even a VPS?Ranges from under 1 second to 1.8 seconds. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131030_TJ_120D/
Normally with Pingdom, its about a second and sometimes half a second.
There are many managed hosts to choose from. I host with WPEngine.
@Mealtog - I'm looking at a dedicated VPS from digitalocean.com. Prices are much more reasonable than most WordPress managed hosting site, though you're on your own to create the site and resolve any problems. Considering that I need support for multiple domains, most managed hosting options are priced beyond a reasonable level for me to consider. Even when I find one with reasonable pricing, like LightningBase, then I'm left with insufficient space.
For example, I'm using 30 GB on my current VPS with HostGator. Mostly due to the photography site, as those images can chew up some space. I'm considering moving those to Amazon S3, but that's another beast of a project in itself to ensure my media safely moves to a different server without breaking the blog.
I'm not a fan of shared hosting. You never know what the crazy neighbors are doing.
–William
http://williambeem.com@William, I feed your pain with a photography website. Size does matter in this case. You know, there must be a way for us to hook WordPress to take advantage of the 1TB of free space they offer now. If WP was only serving featured images, it would free up a lot of resources to just power the website and not the images. Hmmm.....
@Mealtog - There are other resources. Some photographers host their images on Flickr and then use an embed code to show them on their site. However, I find that's not best for my business or SEO. I even go so far as to share an embed code for my photos on my WordPress site so people can use them, but I get the link to my photography site - not to Flickr. That helps lead other people to my site, and there may be some SEO juice for having tens of thousands of backlinks.
It comes with a price, though. I have to host those images and deliver them quickly. So it's not just space that I need, but web server performance.
–William
http://williambeem.comAbsolutely. By the way, is your embed code jvscript or a hard link. Hope it's a hard link for more SEO juice.
Come to think of it, have you tried any budget friendly CDNs. That might help since we are talking about performance of image-heavy websites.
I tried MaxCDN once. While I liked the service, I must not have configured it properly because it wouldn't show my photos in an expanded mode, like ShadowBox, FancyBox, etc. I need to allow folks to click the image to see a larger version. Since that wasn't working, I gave up on it and haven't gone back to resolve it.
My embed code comes from a WordPress plugin and it generates HTML for folks to use. It's a direct link.
–William
http://williambeem.com@William - We do managed hosting, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised about our pricing. If you're interested to discuss further, just drop us a note using the email link in my signature.
Here's a site we built for a client, http://www.mostresource.org. It's running about 30 plugins (including some hefty ones, like NGG). Cached pages ought to be served up in about 600 ms (6/10 of a second) or less; uncached pages in slightly more, but well under 2 seconds. I think it would be very, very difficult, if not impossible, to serve a complex site like this on a single VPS as quickly as we serve it, especially with high traffic loads.
Nginx is the way you want to go if you opt to become your own server admin. The challenge is that being a server admin leaves all of those unglamorous tasks (optimizing the server, backups, security) to you, which is time away from content creation. If you have the interest to tinker, it's fun to learn. However, at the end of the day, you have 1 VPS talking to 1 DB server, whereas those doing managed WP hosting like us have multiple web servers talking to multiple DB servers, and that redundancy provides a level of protection that you don't get with 1 VPS, even if you manage to tweak the performance to try to come close to the performance of managed WP hosting.
Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform
We do managed WordPress hosting.
@Bill - Thanks, I'll take a look. I'm running about six different WordPress sites. Where can I find pricing/resource information about your service?
–William
http://williambeem.com@William - The best thing is to send an email via the link in my signature. You'll get answers to whatever questions you have.
Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform
We do managed WordPress hosting.
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