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By andrew7 on
I have yet to come across a Drupal site on a shared host that loads in less than 5 seconds.
If Dreamhost can do it, I'd love to see an example...
If convinced, I'll ask for your referral link before signing up with them (you get their $65 referral fee).
Thanks,
K.
Comments
So I'm a happy dreamhost customer, I'll bite:
Clearing my cache in Firefox over wireless network, 54mbs on Comcast cable. In Seattle, their datacenter is in LA I think.
Measuring load time using firebug net feature. All have google analytics & of course jquery .js on them which slows the load time down. None have drupal caching on.
www.bearideas.com - loads in 32ms
www.creeksidemedicine.com - loads in 66 ms
www.hvanswer.com - loads in 56ms
www.portanswer.com - loads in 39ms
www.davidkertzer.com - loads in 109ms
All load in < 5 seconds (most days) and all domains are on one shared $7/mo account.
-Greg
I just checked the
I just checked the portanswer.com site and it took 20+ seconds to load.
I too have a site hosted on dreamhost and it usually take like at least 10 seconds to load on good days. That is not the bad part dreamhost a lot of the time it is down. I'm not sure what kind of problems that they have going on but some times my site is unreachable. The outage will sometime last a couple of hours.
for the best performance you want a host that have the MySQL server on the same host as your site. I'm in the process of looking for a new host. I will let you know what I find out. If anyone has a reasonable priced service that have the sql svr on the same machine as the site. I'm game and if you can post a link to a couple of sites that are hosted on there that would be great.
www.consumercowboy.com rounding up the best deals on the web !!
Sorry to inform you, but.....
Your sites are totally unacceptable in loading time. They load anywhere from 2+ seconds to 30+ seconds depending on the moment when you click on the link.
This is EXACTLY the same behavior I get on my two websites hosted on Dreamhost. By far, the load times take 20-30 seconds. Sometimes, browsing just croaks altogether. Occasionally, sites load in 5-8 seconds.
This tells me that Dreamhost's mysql servers are seriously overtaxed. I've complained repeatedly to no avail, so I'm moving to Site5 and Mosso eventually, due to their excellent (yet costly) clustered servers.
Hold off on mosso
I wouldn't move to mosso quite yet. We just closed our account with them because of frequent down-time. They still have some ironing out to do. It's a shame because they have a fantastic support team...just the service isn't where it needs to be yet.
That's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen. Dreamhost has been notoriously slow over the last year. Even a totally stripped down Drupal install with no blocks is slow on Dreamhost. We just created Drupal.st which is running Mediawiki on the front and a totally empty drupal install and it takes 30 seconds on Dreamhost. So it is not just Drupal but most PHP applications that run slow.
And in fairness to Dreamhost, the other large shared hosting providers in the same class are not any faster. PHP applications are running slower and slower on shared hosting as a whole. Bluehost and a small orange are not showing any flashes of speed either.
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You are right
Dreamhost is ridiculously slow when it comes to mysql queries. Since most of Drupal depends on 200+ mysql queries per page, Dreamhost is totally unacceptable.
I just moved a client from Dreamhost to Site5 and got a 100X increase in database speed.
So far, no problems with Site5, although I'll qualify that with a disclaimer that my site doesn't have a ton of traffic yet.
However, Dreamhost takes 20-30 seconds to load a page, no matter how "light" the web traffic might be. Transfer the identical site to Site5, and everything loads in 1-2 seconds.
That's pretty definitive to me. I'm transferring all my sites to Site5 for now.
Not DreamHost but check load time
www.diatribune.com I think this site is loading faster.
Who is your host? loads
Who is your host?
loads really fast for the most part, I know you don't have a lot of graphics but still the PHP is pretty quick.
www.consumercowboy.com rounding up the best deals on the web !!
sorry
Posted in wrong spot hostmonster is who I use now
futurequest.net
I've been using http://www.futurequest.net/Services/Packages/ for the last 3 years and must say they have the best customer service I've ever experienced. The MySQL servers are on a separate servers specially optimized for database operations. I have been very please with my website performance.
They don't have the biggest numbers in terms of hd space, bandwith, etc, But in this case you are actually getting what you pay for instead of overinflated bandwith number, if you know what I mean.
You can check out one of my sites at Dog Agility Vision for performance.
Hostmonster
I recently switched from siteground to hostmonster and saw a dramatic decrease in page load times. I have seen a couple of other positive reviews for hostmonster as well. Whatever you do stay far away from siteground unless you like blank pages
Drupal on Dream Host
Maybe I'm full of it, I'm a total rank amateur when it comes to Drupal, I'm in the process of setting up a web site http://www.softrockradio.org/ I first heard about Drupal a few days ago and I have not had a chance to crack the documentation very much.
I'm new with Dream Host, signed up a few days ago so I can't say anything about the past but as of this week if I flush my cache and hit my site on Firefox it loads in less than two seconds going between pages is about a second.
I left my old host "Stargate" after non-stop sql errors when I first tried to set up a test site, after moving it to Dream Host I have not had a single error, so far I'm a happy camper.
Stargate has been going around changing the terms of the packages without so much as informing the customers of the changes, I would not recommend them to anyone except my enemies.
So far I 'm happy with Drupal but then I'm new and have a simple site.
Cecil
K5NWA
Blessed are the cracked for they shall let the light in.
Dreamhost loading time solution
We have several drupal sites on dreamhost accounts and have been frustrated until recently. You flat out can't run drupal on a basic account. It may run, but you will see unexplainable problems and waste tons of development time trying to track them down. (I know from experience.)
You can run drupal on a vps account. These are only about $25 per month. The site will run OKAY with normal caching running if you are using the shared db servers at dreamhost. The problem though is that drupal doesnt like it when the db is on a different server. And you will really be frustrated when you are logged in as an admin (no caching) and the pages take 20 seconds to load.
THE SOLUTION: We finally decided to install MySQL on our VPS account and it made a HUGE difference. It took about an hour. I can't express how much this improved Dreamhost as a hosting solution for us. I can now host as many sites as I want on this one VPS account and they run very fast. When we compared the same site on an identical VPS configuration, with the only difference being where the database was located, the version with the local database ran literally 10X faster. Give it a try.
Dreamhost loading time solution, how?
Hello Mick,
how did you install the MySQL database on your VPS account? I've asked tech support if they could do this for me but they refused, stating that I had to buy a MySQL VPS, which totally defeats the purpose of having all in the same machine.
I hope you happen to come across this post (it's been a while indeed).
F
MYSQL on VPS
Yeah, they do not support this operation. And you are correct the VPS MySQL account. It is on a separate server and has the same latency problems. To install MySQL on your VPS account you will need to create an admin user in the Dreamhost CP. This will give you root access to the VPS. From there you can install it just like you would on any other LAMP server. Once installed, you can use localhost to connect. You can also install phpmyadmin.
Note: Since this is an unsupported configuration, Dreamhost backups will not catch it. You will need to set up your own backups. If you dump your db into a directory within one of your website user accounts the dumps will be backed up by Dreamhost.
If you use the "reset" option in the CP to reset the state of your server, the MySQL installation will be lost. Basically you will be on your own with this configuration. But, I think it's worth it.
Hope this helps.
Thank you Mick, I'll let you
Thank you Mick, I'll let you and the community know how this came through.
F
The whole point of a VPS is
The whole point of a VPS is so you can install anything you want. Are you using a Dreamhost VPS? And they don't let you install MySQL on it? Time to switch; I recommend Ramnode. If you need help configuring the server, I could do it in about 90 minutes for $150, just give me your drupal site and I'll have a lean and mean LEMP (linux, nginx, mysql, php) environment server rocking and rolling.
Ramnode's 256 SSD-cached KVM plan is $8 a month, which is on par with these crappy shared hosts. They have a 40% off coupon for life going on right now; PM me if you want it. 256MB of RAM will last you a good amount of time when running nginx rather than bloated apache2.
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Yes, a Drupal site can load under 5 seconds on a shared host
I've been able to have Drupal 6 website pages load on shared hosting with times between 200ms and 450ms (and even 112ms a couple of times). This according to several test figures. This was achieved by not using JavaScript (or very little), using a light theme with abbreviated markup (Yahoo style short hand coding), no whitespace, using embedded CSS for styles and no decorative pictures in the theme, using Drupal caching and static file caching, and .htaccess configurations such as .gz. The pages complying to W3C, WCAG2, sec. 508 standards and achieving an A rating in YSlow.
What can be a bottleneck in such a setup are pictures in your articles, and adding those can cause some slowup. However using an external URL for loading those can make a big difference. Even adding some light JavaScript minimized and optimized won't slow down the website too much.
So, that Drupal is always slow is not true. It can, depending on your website hosting setup, be slow out of the box. There are multiple ways of configuring it after that, whether through a dedicated server setup, some tuning, or combining options. Attaining speed without losing functionality. Most CMS can be sped up with tuning and some tweaks. CMS's regularly coming with a standard set-up out of the box.
I don't host with Dreamhost, so don't know if it is possible there, ofcourse, but Drupal can be fast. Quite so, in fact. Just needs some tuning. :-)
Is it your best option? Well, that depends. The things that can be automated, don't have to make a difference in work load. Things that require a lot of manual labor for example may end up costing more in time, than if you get a more powerful server set up. It also depends on whether you have a mostly static or dynamic website. Optimisation, less code, and reduced overhead without losing the functionality and workability for the participants (e.g. for content workers, developers, and designers) can be better for performance. There are different opinions on how to achieve this e.g. some people don't like shorthand code, while others do. This is just an example that it is possible to retain high loading speeds in a shared hosting environment using conventional methods.
Notes:
1. Whitespace removal was done by a script, which can be turned off when doing layout, so HTML looks normal enough to style in Firebug. As all files were statically cached, there was no overhead during display.
2. CSS and JavaScript were written in PHP files using Yahoo style shorthand coding, and then included in the page with no white space. CSS placed at the top and JavaScript at the bottom of the page. There are two copies of the CSS and JavaScript files, one the work version e.g. for design and working on the JavaScript. When ready these are then pulled through optimization scripts and saved for the publishing end.
3. Cache updated on new content or changes to content. Cache can be preloaded, or set to cache on page load, and not change unless there is a change to that page.
4. Shorthand coding example:
5. Comments were set to review and published at regular intervals, so that there was no loss of performance there.
6. When you embed CSS and JavaScript into the static HTML, the browser only has one thing to load. There are no other calls. This because calls are said to slow down a website. If the website's pages are small in kb this is an option. With a website with pages larger in kb a better option could be to link to a single CSS or as few JavaScript files as possible as these can be cached by the browser. (The caveat being that JavaScript can sometimes be finicky about when, where, and in which order it is loaded)
7. Complying to W3C actually seems to render websites faster in CMS's/ browsers. Don't know why this is, maybe because the processor/ browser doesn't get stuck on 'buggy' code, but that is guesstimating.
I used to host on Dreamhost
I used to host on Dreamhost and I agree it's only possible to get decent performance if you use a VPS and install MySQL directly on it. Unfortunately one of the sites I hosted there was getting quite a lot of traffic and kept exceeding the memory limit on my VPS so as I didn't want to spend any more on the account, I chopped it.
Other shared hosting offerings run Drupal quite nicely, as long as MySQL is installed on the same server as the rest of the stack. A networked MySQL server is only really practical in a non-shared environment, at least in my experience. I get good performance from Nativespace here in the UK, for example, though their hosting is not free from other issues.
Instructions here:
http://howtogetitworking.com/2011/06/28/installing-mysqld-dreamhost-vps/