Why has my hosting become so slow?

March 29, 2007 5:29 PM

GoDaddy hosting has become intolerably slow: is it certainly their fault? If so, can I do anything about it? If it isn't their fault, what am I doing wrong?

I am running a number of MySQL and PHP based websites using hosting from GoDaddy.com. Specifically, I am running three WordPress blogs and a MediaWiki based wiki. During the last few weeks, they have all become markedly slower than previously. Is this certainly the result of server-side congestion, or is there something I could do to speed things up?

To give an example, it now takes twenty seconds or more between clicking the 'Write' button on the main WordPress screen and actually having the page for writing entries come up. Naturally, this makes all of these sites frustrating to maintain.

None of the sites gets a huge amount of traffic (in total, they get under 200 visits a day). If the slowdown is GoDaddy's fault, is there anything I can do about it, short of switching to a new hosting provider? I am using their Economy level Linux shared hosting account.

posted by sindark to computers & internet (9 answers total)

You're undoubtedly running your sites on a shared server; that is, there are other sites running on those machines. Your sites might not get a lot of traffic, but other sites on your machine(s) might be.

So it's not GoDaddy's fault, exactly -- you probably chose them in part because of the low hosting costs versus high feature set -- but they're saving you money by hosting too many people on the machine (or are experiencing network problems, or what have you.)

Take it up with their tech support, and see what they say. Even the best places have occasional glitches, and it may be a migration to a newer, faster machine is scheduled for, say, tomorrow -- or perhaps they lost a machine, and temporarily dropped those users on your machine while they sorted things out (not likely, but possible.)
posted by davejay at 5:54 PM on March 29, 2007

One other issue that may be worth mentioning: every few weeks, during the last couple of months, I have had one of the four MySQL servers fail for a period between a few minutes and a day. Generally, it is also very slow and/or unstable for a day or so before or after.

I did call their tech support during one particularly long such failure. They said that they knew it was happening, that they were working on it, and that there was nothing to do but wait.
posted by sindark at 6:13 PM on March 29, 2007

My very small and seldom-visited site is hosted with GoDaddy and right now loads in a flash, if that data point helps.
posted by TedW at 6:16 PM on March 29, 2007

It may have nothing to do with either of you. Connections between you and the machine(s) on which your sites are impossible to control. Did you try tracert to see which hosts had the slowest response times?
posted by IronLizard at 7:23 PM on March 29, 2007

@IronLizard,

Here is what traceroute gives me. It doesn't look too promising:

traceroute output
(I put it in a text file so as not to clog this thread)

--- sindark.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 146.564/146.751/147.016/0.118 ms

Can anything be done about this?
posted by sindark at 2:45 AM on March 30, 2007

I tried comparing it to a trace from here, but the requests keep timing out. The page will load, however. It's slow, but not unusually so.
Also at the end of the trace's timeouts it popped up with this:

17 * * * Request timed out.
18 180 ms 77 ms 58 ms linhost138.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net [64.202.1
63.78]

So it's obvious, at least, that your machine is taking a far more convoluted route to the server, but since the shorter route from me also took about 10 seconds to load a page there's probably a server/router problem.

I think you probably need to call GoDaddy again (that page load is pretty ridiculous). I used them for a shared host for someone and the pageload (FULL of jpegs/javascript/otherjunk) is blazing fast in comparison (2-3 seconds at most.
posted by IronLizard at 12:16 PM on March 30, 2007

Oh, scratch that first "not unusually so". It is.
posted by IronLizard at 12:16 PM on March 30, 2007

I put some more ping and traceroute data on my wiki. I don't entirely understand why the ping time is decent (about 150ms) but the traceroute keeps timing out.

In any case, I will try calling GoDaddy when I have forty minutes to spend on hold.
posted by sindark at 7:29 AM on April 8, 2007

They say "14-15 seconds for shared hosting is not bad."

I am considering my options, in terms of moving to a different company.
posted by sindark at 7:46 AM on April 9, 2007