My blog tends to be a little bit slow at times. The reason for this is twofold:
- I’m hosted on a shared box, along with a dozen other websites. We all share resources, and thus sometimes we can experience slowdowns. Especially if someone on my box gets slashdotted, digged, farked, borinboinged or etc.. We all suffer then. Although my host handled my site being digged wonderfully. I had a 100% uptime during the heaviest barrage so I was quite happy.
- I’m using wordpress, which means that every page load = DB query + php parse + javascript magic.
There is not much I can do about #1. That is other than paying for dedicated host, which is not something I’m willing to do right now. But I can definitely cut down on the DB queries, and dynamic content to shave off few seconds per page load via caching.
Enter WP-Cache plugin – the latest and greatest in WordPress optimization. I set the cache to expire after 20 minutes for now. The default setting is an hour, but I was a little worried that the static content might get a little stale and etc… I might increase it later.
Anyways, if you notice any weird things going on with the blog, let me know. I’m mainly worried about stuff like the feeds not updating in a timely manner, and people’s comments not showing up immediately after posting. If you notice that, shoot me an email, or leave a comment in this post and I will see what can I do about this.
I already noticed small speedup on subsequent loads of the main page so this might work out really nicely.
[tags]wordpress, plugins, cache, wp-cache, wp[/tags]
You’re lucky your site lived without a cache plugin. Who’s your host?
I use dreamhost. They are cheap, and offer very good plans for the value. You get tons of space, and a lot of bandwidth on the cheap. But they are a little bit flaky at times.
Here is the thing – I survived being digged just fine, but then there were days when my website was inaccessible because they kept loosing power, or when they had a broken router, or when they fried a switch, or when they lost power again…
Despite the occasional technical issues they never lost my data though, so that’s a big plus.
Meh I heard bad things about dream host. Like randomly going down etc. I use HostMonster. They oversell their b/w and hdd space like dream host, they can survive Digg and slashdot decently as well.
Yup, they indeed do that. Every once in a while they will have a total system meltdown for no good reason. But most of the time they usually recover within the next 24 hours or less without any data loss.
You get what you pay for I guess. :)
If I was making many oney of this site, i would probably shell out for dedicated hosting, colocation or whatever. But for a personal blog it is decent. As long as you can put up with some downtime now and then that is…
Done the dreamhost thing and it was ok for the price. Now I’m on my own dedicated server and I’m not looking back. I feel the power!