Your choice of server host makes a big difference

[jmcafee]

Meteotemplate relies heavily on server based routines like PHP and MySQL. Your choice of host can make a gigantic difference on the performance of your website.

For the better part of eternity I have used a commercial hosting provider that features a (now former) professional race car driver as one of their models and spokeswoman. For the past year the performance of their shared economy web hosting has been absolutely dreadful, with glacial page loads and server timeouts when trying to graph more than a year's worth of data.

There is hope for better hosts. After evaluating the review of commercial hosts here https://hostingfacts.com/ and other sources, I chose to move my site to the shared host provider with the fastest page loads (in the top 4 of https://hostingfacts.com/).

What a remarkable difference the hosting provider makes. The new commercial host is only 25-33% slower compared to the mirror site on my own home server running an i5 with gobs of memory, which makes very little practical difference. For example, graphing 3 years of data takes 4 seconds from the commercial shared host, and 3 second from my local server. No difference in normal page loads, and there is no empty data in the home page blocks unlike with my former commerical server (I'm sure because of php/mysql timeouts).

The incentive for me to roll my own host is drastically less now that I am using a decent commercial host of reasonable cost.

If the performance of your website isn't meeting your expectations, I suggest that you look elsewhere.

[Johnny]

Hi jmcafee, very interesting website - thanks for the link. What a shame, the hosting company I use has only been given one star

[LOBWX]

Nice to see SiteGround near the top.

[MonyMony]

Very interesting and thanks for sharing. When my current agreement is up with my host provider (or if they just continue to drive me crazy beforehand) I will use this suggestion in looking for a new provider.

[andyk1]

Hi jmcafee, very interesting website - thanks for the link. What a shame, the hosting company I use has only been given one star

Ha, so your site made the list. surprisingly 1and1.com didn't even make the list. I am shopping for the forth time this past 8 months.

The one thing I really like over the rest is there tech support. I can't stand ticketing and email only support. The upsells drive me nuts though.

Andy

[Johnny]

Hi Andy, four times in eight months - that's not good. I use Namecheap who came in at number 30 on this hosting list. I've been using them for the last two years and so far they haven't been increasing their prices (unlike Host Excellence who I was using before) I've not had any major issues, but when you do get in touch with them, you have to sign in before you get to the technical enquiry page. They've been prtty good at getting back to me promptly to help me with any issues.

The fella who's done the testing (John Stevens) seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to check all these companies out, so if I ever need to change hosting I'll certainly be coming back to his site to look at his reviews.

I hope you have better luck with present or next hosting company.