Author Topic: Higher quality hosting (Read 4529 times)

steheap · « **on:** April 09, 2013, 16:25 »

Leo

A question about hosting!

I'm currently with Bluehost and my site is working. However, it does seem slow (both in the admin side when I am publishing an image, say, as well as the serving of the site to the buyer). The admin side is particularly annoying when I am trying to upload thousands of images and get them nicely described etc.

I had a long chat today with the technician/sales person at a local hosting company where we were comparing the low cost shared hosting plan like Bluehost with a virtual share of a server cloud that they offer which provides guarantees on the processor/memory:
60 GB Storage
1 TB Monthly Transfer
768 MB Guaranteed RAM
1.5 GB Burst RAM
Hardware RAID 10
4 IP Addresses

However, this guaranteed partition of a server (no-one can eat into your allocation) costs a lot more than $4.95 a month - more like $49 a month. However, if this is going to be a professional venture for me, then I want it always to perform for my customers.

I know you have a dedicated server - do you think that such packages will make a difference to how my site performs?

Steve

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #1 on:** April 09, 2013, 16:47 »

Hiya!

I just visited your site and its lightning fast for me. And I'm on a wireless connection in the backwoods. You should ask people for site speed feedback and check out http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Your network results will be slow - until we update functionality on that. Other than that - your fast for me.

My personal opinion (just an opinion, since hosting can be a real subjective subject) is that you can stay where you are for a nice long time and not worry. When you start seeing more traffic trickle in, sales, etc, you can upgrade.

Here's a cute back-story. When I decided to host myself I picked up some books on PHP, html, and SEO - and just spent a month or two absorbing it all. Then I built a stock photo site on localhost (without wordpress) then when I was ready I rented a dedicated server on inmotion. Inmotion... its not 4.95 a month..and transferred everything over. http://www.inmotionhosting.com/ ... so I didn't have an option to fail. But I wanted to lay a good foundation. Had my first sale within a few weeks. Within a few months it was going well.

This last few days my site has made me about $60, and the hosting pays for itself, though I wish I could do a little better. I sometimes talk to my wife about switching to bluehost to increase my profit margin. Some months it does a few thousand (if a collection sells or a few people buy many images for a large project).

In a nutshell - scale up as you need to. You don't need perfect right away...or at all. Stick to the entry level stuff until your completely ready, experienced, and confident enough to move into a bigger office so to speak.

Leo Blanchette · « **Reply #2 on:** April 09, 2013, 17:12 »

Quote from: steheap on April 09, 2013, 16:25

However, it does seem slow (both in the admin side when I am publishing an image, say, as well as the serving of the site to the buyer). The admin side is particularly annoying when I am trying to upload thousands of images and get them nicely described etc.

Btw if you process quite a few images at once, the slowness will come from the image crunching it does. Also admin in general can be slow depending on what programs your running. Admin has *a lot* going on in it code-wise. But like I said strangely enough your site is really fast for me on the front.

Travelling-light · « **Reply #3 on:** April 09, 2013, 17:15 »

Just a hint on speed of processing - you may already know this - but after processing an image you can click and hold the back button, a menu will come up, and you can go back to your previous page and process the next image. For us it's usually the third one down on the menu. Hope that makes sense!
Had forgotten about this, and spent some painful time going the long way round!
We are using Firefox, don't know if it works with other browsers.

Travelling-light · « **Reply #4 on:** April 09, 2013, 17:24 »

Also, didn't realise this immediately, but after adding your focus keyword, if you do that last, you can just click enter and it will save the draft.

steheap · « **Reply #5 on:** April 09, 2013, 17:29 »

Thanks all for the useful advice! Makes sense!

Quote

focus keyword

I see this in the SEO program - I thought it was used to judge the SEO worthiness of the page - is it used for something external that helps the placement of the page?

Steve

Travelling-light · « **Reply #6 on:** April 09, 2013, 17:59 »

Quote from: steheap on April 09, 2013, 17:29

I see this in the SEO program - I thought it was used to judge the SEO worthiness of the page - is it used for something external that helps the placement of the page?

Steve

It's just internal, we're using it as a check that it appears in the right places - the title and description are all optimised before upload, so save/check and see what colour the indicator goes.

click_click · « **Reply #7 on:** April 09, 2013, 18:04 »

My established blog (LOL) has now 1000 unique visitors a month - I know it's ridiculous.

I wish I had that many paying customers and with those I could still be on shared hosting.

I don't think you really have a problem with your host as of now.

Your site loads fast and often it's not the host's fault. It's also how you set up your site and regular maintenance as well.

Like Leo said, keep doing what you're doing, once your server costs are covered I would think about upgrading.