Get your Web Page to Load Faster

Over the last few week’s, traffic on my site has dramatically increased. One problem, my current hosting plan was no longer cutting it. My site was unavailable all together every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11am to 1pm. This is by the way the time when the most people are on the internet, looking for new website’s.

I was at that time on a Go Daddy, Deluxe Hosting plan. This is what they call a shared hosting plan. That means that I was sharing a server with a bunch of other website’s. So, my site’s speed was not only effected by my traffic, but also by those other site’s I was sharing space with.

Dedicated Server?

Everyone I was talking to, told me I’d have to bite the bullet and get a dedicated server account. A dedicated server would solve the problem, but they cost between $60 to $300 per month! I’m not the New York Time’s! So, I started looking for other alternatives.

Grid Hosting?

An alternative to dedicated servers, is Grid Hosting. Here as your traffic increases, more server’s are called online to serve data to your hungry visitor’s. It has been absolutely amazing. Let me compare:

Shared Hosting

• During heavy traffic period’s my web page wouldn’t load at all
• During semi-heavy period’s my site would take 7 second’s to load
• My site on average took 4 second’s to load (Still not fast enough)

Grid Hosting

• My site loads in 2 seconds or less during heavy traffic periods!
• It costs the same amount as the shared deluxe plan ($6.99 / mon)
• Go Daddy, will perform the whole account transfer for free

Negative’s of Grid Hosting

• You can’t use Java on your site
• You can’t use ColdFusion on your site
• You can’t serve your own video, but you can embed video

False Rumor’s About Go Daddy

Almost everywhere you look, you see people saying how bad Go Daddy is. Who are these people? My guess is that most of them are competitor’s. The reason why is that every time they say something bad about Go Daddy, they talk about how they host with this unknown hosting company. I’d like to set a few thing’s straight:

• My average wait time is normally 3 minute’s for free customer support
• It takes about 10 minute’s maximum for them to make any site change’s for you
• They will walk you through most any fix on the phone, for free
• They are very inexpensive for all that you get
• I have had period’s in which I had to contact them multiple times in one day. All the technical support, was free

You should definitely give grid hosting a try. Heck, if you have a Deluxe Plan already, it cost’s the same per month.

Till Next Time

Think Tank