For some years of my life, I worked in the support of a company in the area of website hosting.
The company followed a product plan aligned with a proposal to offer a simple experience for those looking to build their first website on the internet.
However, anyone who has worked in support knows the reality of serving customers unhappy with the product or service.
During my working hours, I attended to the most varied types of problems, from sites deleted by mistake, WordPress themes that didn’t work as expected, emails that stopped working …
But one type of problem caught my attention: freeing blocked sites that reached the consumption limit of the plan, a very specific limit: CPU and memory usage in 90-second cycles.
If you have had, worked or still know cases similar to this one, today’s article will address ways on how to boost your host’s performance.
How is the experience of using shared hosting?
Most Internet host companies follow a very common business scheme: Cheap shared hosting plans.
They are attractive for the investment value, receive a usage panel, such as a cPanel or Plesk, have resource limits, such as the number of sites, domains to be used, disk space and number of e-mail accounts.
They are called shared plans because, within the same server, there are thousands of accounts that consume the physical resource of that hosting server.
This type of solution is excellent for small businesses, entrepreneurs, young web programmers, or even for those with little money to invest in a service with more resources.
The big problem in this scenario will be the factor that we call * pop success *, which was the expression we used in support to define the client who suffered from the success of your site within a shared plan.
Is it possible to take your site offline by dealing with a high number of visitors?
Yes, it is possible. This is the reality of many people today.
The limits described in the small print
Whenever we subscribe to a service, there is a contract with the rules for using and consuming that service, correct?
In the case of shared website hosting, there are, in small letters, the plan’s resource limit that the marketing team does not disclose in paid campaigns or on the product page.
These are the limits for the use of physical resources.
Such limits are:
- Percentage of CPU usage, usually 25% to 35% usage over a 90 to 120-second time cycle;
- Limit of bandwidth or the famous traffic, usually measured in GB starting with 500 and reaching up to 1500;
- Limit of inodes that indicate the number of files and folders that exist in the account is usually limited to 250,000;
- Email sending limit, usually limited to 500 emails per hour.
Thus, many think that monetizing the site will already bring the financial return to invest in a plan with more resources, this in a way makes sense, however, in this company where I worked, the purchase journey started with the acquisition of a plan shared hosting ended with the solution of acquiring a VPS server, with a much more complex panel to use and with much higher subscription fees.
The terror of those who suffer from the success of your site is usually a financial investment.
Still, before thinking about the investment leap, there are ways to monitor your site and optimize resources.
Tools to monitor website performance
There are free tools to monitor the performance of your sites and can follow the entire process of building variations and versions of your tests.
I indicate the following tools:
- [GTmetrix] (https://gtmetrix.com/) — [Google PageSpeed Insights] (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) — [Pingdom Website Speed Test] (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/) These are three of the most popular tools that report the number of requests, file sizes and speed of response from the server and provide suggestions for improvements.
Based on this analysis, you will be able to create an action plan for improvement.
Attention and direct action for optimizations
The actions listed here are vital to the good performance of all sites in the process of creation and constant improvement. Check out!
Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN increases download speed when distributing website assets to other servers. These machines can be physically closer to the user and run on different domains, which more than doubles the HTTP request limits.
Optimize website media
Large images must be resized to reduce the resolution.
Unique compression tasks can be performed using online tools like TinyPNG / JPE or smush. It. Installable processing tools like OptiPNG, PNGOUT, jpegtran and jpegoptim can compress images in bulk.
Remove unnecessary codes
Especially if your site is built on WordPress.
Review the theme used, the plugins that can be removed, the CSS that can be revised, the integrations with social networks that can use lighter solutions.
The important thing is to document, test and evaluate these changes and their return on optimizing your website.
Enable the cache
Caching ensures that the browser downloads asset files once. The local version is maintained until your website instructs you to check for an update.
There are plugins for content management systems, such as WordPress, that make caching simple, for example, W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
Choose a good hosting plan
Any optimization will bring positive results, however, there is no escape when it comes to maintaining an online service, you need to invest in a quality hosting plan that can meet your peak access.
Thus, with the popularization of hosting plans in the cloud, it is now much easier to hire a service that will accompany the growth of your website along with the increase in simultaneous visits.
There is no longer a need to make such a huge leap, out of a shared plan to hire a dedicated server that will be a good part of the month idle.
Thinking about this audience, mainly in most parts of the CMS market, LetsCloud made life easier for those who chose WordPress as a creation tool.
You can use your LetsCloud instance and with a single click install the most complete and requested CMS on the market.
Take the test and be impressed by the speed of WordPress in our cloud.
If you don’t already have a plan with us, talk to our sales team and request a special condition to start your new project in the cloud!
