Forum Techy Probs....

The situation is the site used to be hosted on a dedicated server with a budget "pile em high and sell em cheap" hosting company. A dedicated server only has one web site on it but there were often periods of complete downtime regularly for several hours and the connect time was poor. Their customer service sucked and their technical support was extremely slow and never explained any issues.

When I moved hosting companies in March / April I moved to a quality, well respected host. Hosting companies are like everything else, you get what you pay for. A dedicated server with the new host would be much more expensive than with the previous, so I went for a shared server which would cost about the same as before.

This is kind of sacrifcing one thing for another - gaining excellent customer service and technical support, little to no downtime and fast connect times (mostly) but losing some performance when other sites on the server are undertaking resource intensive tasks.

I'll look out of periods of slowness now that I'm online a bit more and will notify the hosting company when I spot them. I reported one such instance before my vacation and the hosting company found the site was being hammered several times a second from one IP address, which could possibly have been a malicious attempt to disrupt the server.

Of course the real answer is to have a dedicated server with the better hosting company. However, the cost for that would be $160 per month more than I currently pay - almost $2,000 per year more.

Looking at the site as a business, which is what it ultimately is, that extra cost is extremely unlikely to be offset by increased income brought about by improved performance a better server would bring.

As mentioned I'll report periods of slowness to the host and further factors may be identified that can be fixed.

 

The site has been moved to a new server with the same company.

My suspicion is that we were sharing servers with another site that had some very resource intensive processes going on which affected the performance here.

Hopefully things should be much improved.

 

I've started a new thread to report any new problems and will lock this one.

Please post in the thread linked below if you notice any slowdowns:
http://www.cancuncare.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38864