Posts Tagged with “web hosting”

An unsolicited testimonial for my favorite web host, Kinsta:

I’ve used other WordPress hosts, but Kinsta has been the best by far. My site is always online and speedy without even really trying. I have never experienced caching issues like some other managed hosts and I’m never worried about getting suspended for exceeding resources like on shared hosts. Their support team is small but they’ve never let me down. They may cost slightly more than other hosts, but they have been worth every penny. I can’t recommend Kinsta enough.

Why I no longer recommend SiteGround

The above is a common sight if you have a moderately successful website on SiteGround. That’s the screen that SiteGround replaces your site with when you exceed your account’s resource usage. It’s something I’ve experienced regularly over the past 3+ years with dozens of customer sites.

Basically, all shared hosting accounts on SiteGround have a limit for the amount of CPU time and RAM that you can use. SiteGround will send you 1 warning when you are at 90% of that limit, and when you exceed the limit you will get another email notifying you that your site has been temporarily suspended.

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Webfaction hosting gives you lots of flexibility and power, if you can live without cPanel

webfaction-logo

Updated November 2017

Webfaction is an unpretentious, down-to-earth web host that gives you great performance and value. Cool hipsters types may not host their sites here (they’re on Media Temple) but in my 3+ years using Webfaction I’ve been well and truly impressed. Webfaction has provided the greatest performance and value for any web host I’ve ever used, and I happily recommend them.

Fantastic performance

Shortly after switching one of my customers to Webfaction, they had a post go viral. As a result, they received 24k pageviews over a period of 3 days. Webfaction held up like a champ.

24,000 pageviews in 27 hours - no problems

24,000 pageviews in 27 hours – no problems

There were no hiccups, database errors or even slow pages. Of course, I had W3 Total Cache installed and configured but the credit has to go to the web server. Webfaction can also serve your site from multiple servers with automatic load balancing if you need it.

Just 2 weeks ago, a customer of mine who was on Media Temple complained that her site was struggling and that the WordPress dashboard was taking almost 30 seconds to load on average. I switched her to Webfaction and her site immediately started loading quicker and her performance issues have largely been solved.

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Update Nov 2016: I no longer recommend Site5; see: The Sinking of Site5

At the beginning of 2011, I began hosting my websites on Site5. I have been singing their praises and recommending everyone I know to them. Today iThemes publicly announced their endorsement of Site5 hosting (and how terrible Hostgator is too). I’m really excited about the development because iThemes is a major WordPress plugins and themes vendor, so their endorsement confirms my feelings about Site5. Also, the CEOs of both companies have been communicating directly which will hopefully result in even better WordPress compatibility with Site5. Check out the announcement post, Site5 has a 6-month free trial (!) for the iThemes community.

Site5 vs Media Temple, 1 month later

site5

Update Nov 2016: I no longer recommend Site5; see: The Sinking of Site5

Last month I made the switch to Site5, away from Media Temple. The reason for doing so was because of terrible response times on Media Temple. This post is a quick follow up to share my experience of the first month on Site5.

First of all, response times have improved tremendously. The difference is like night and day. My average response time is now 750ms, down from 2,946ms in January.

Guess when I switched over to Site5?

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Now hosted on Site5, goodbye Media Temple

site5

Update Nov 2016: I no longer recommend Site5; see: The Sinking of Site5

Update March 2011: I’ve posted a follow up to this post – Site5 vs Media Temple, 1 month later

blogjunkie.net (and soon the rest of my sites) is now hosted on Site5. This was a tough decision to make, since it would involve migrating all of my sites but I felt that it was necessary because of the project that I’m launching in a few weeks. I didn’t want my members to have a poor site experience due to my web host, Media Temple.

Media Temple, I really wanted it to work out

I’ve been a customer of Media Temple for 2.5+ years. I was attracted to the benefits of their Grid Service because I had outgrown simple shared hosting but wasn’t smart enough to manage my own VPS. The Grid Service promised better scalability and reliability for USD20/month which I was happy to pay. However the Grid constantly had hiccups. In the beginning I decided to stick with Media Temple because of the hassle to switch web hosts and because of their great customer service.

Unfortunately things have deteriorated to the point where I can’t see the situation improving so I’m cutting my losses. In particular, the response times for the Grid Service is absolutely horrible. And lately their customer service ain’t that great either. I did my homework when planning where to move to and used Pingdom to monitor Media Temple’s uptime and response time. The Grid’s response time was consistently more than 2,000 ms, and regularly over 3,000 ms. Here’s the response time report for Jan 2011:

Media Temple Response Time Jan 2011

Media Temple Response Time Jan 2011

If you’re curious, you can see the previous 3 month history at this link.

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