Is Vidahost hosting fast enough?!

[360interactive]

I'm been with my current hosting company for around 4 years, and have never had an issue that wasn't resolved nearly instantly by their support. The thing is, i've come a long way since the start of my site, and now the 50 quid a year hosting is getting a little slow.

I need the hosting for my site to be as fast as possible, as most users spend time looking at flash virtual tours. The faster the hosting, the faster the delivery (within users bb speeds obviously). I've been noticing some serious lag on my site of late, so it's time to move on.

I've got a budget of around 50 pounds a month (exc VAT) to play with, so dedicated hosting probably isn't going to be possible. I've noticed Vidahost do a premium service:

http://www.vidahost.com/business-plus-hosting/uk-premium-hosting.php

which looks good to me, although i'm no expert on hosting. They seem to have all great reviews, plus they're based near me!

Can anyone give any views on this?

Thanks.

PS: Please no offers of hosting for 2.99 a year, i'm not after cheap! Just fast!

 

[mysterons]

For the budget you have you may want to look at a VPS solution, I'm sure someone will be along shortly to recommend someone on here who can do this for you (resisting any temptation to shamelessly self-promote!)

Cheers

Ewan

 

[crossdaz]

I have a VDS at Vidahost and it seems OK - I'm paying just short of £100 but there may be a cheaper option depending on how much bandwidth you need.


Like yourself I was struggling with the budget package I had elsewhere and moved to Vidahost about 2 months ago because they seem to get a lot of good comments.

I can't really comment on your exact requirements but overall I think they are one of the better UK hosts.

 

[360interactive]

Thanks both, but what is VPS/VDS? Is it dedicated?

Don't need loads of bandwidth, and the site is only around 4gb in size, so not huge.

 

[crossdaz]

Thanks both, but what is VPS/VDS? Is it dedicated?

Virtual Dedicated Server
You are still sharing but with only a limited number and you are also isolated - so they can't affect your sites. (that's the non-techy explanation )

 

[KM-Tiger]

Before you leap, do you know where the bottleneck is?

Slow response from a webserver could be caused by:

CPU
Lack of memory causing swapping
Disk I/O
The network connection
Database not optimised
Caching not used where it would help

Changing hosts *might* solve the problem, but it would be better to know why.

 

[360interactive]

Thanks, i guess it's similar then to the premium offer, they say the server only has you and 10 others on it?

I presume there is a lot more sharing my current hosting..

 

[360interactive]

Before you leap, do you know where the bottleneck is?

Slow response from a webserver could be caused by:

CPU
Lack of memory causing swapping
Disk I/O
The network connection
Database not optimised
Caching not used where it would help

Changing hosts *might* solve the problem, but it would be better to know why.

Ah, now this is a question. Maybe a call to the support desk of my current provider would be helpful, they have 24/7 chat so I may go off and ask them now.

 

[360interactive]

Well the support desk couldn't identify any issues, and just told me to look at VPS or dedicated if I didn't want interrupted service, so thats that.

Think i'll be making a call to Vida tomorrow, I just hope they can do the leg work with transferring the site as the thought of this scares me to bits!

 

[Dominic Taylor]

Thanks crossdaz!

I tend not to recommend a VDS if you have high performance needs - they're just slices of servers so less powerful than our shared hosting monsters for example. I recommend them for people who're looking for custom feature sets, who need to run bespoke apps, etc.

If you have a higher budget then a good-sized VDS (2Gb RAM+) or dedicated server will give you top performance and isolation from the rare times when other users on the system try to cause problems, so I recommend these where budget allows essentially but it depends if the rare problem is worth the difference in cost, also bearing in mind that entry-level dedicated servers don't have redundant PSUs, RAID, firewall protection etc. Shared hosting is a great option for most people and makes it incredibly cheap to get a site up, and the options upwards cope for the % of people who simply must have the added security/power/stability/regulatory checkboxes.

Our normal shared hosting is plenty quick enough indeed (mind you I'm biased!) and our Business+ adds a little extra with its various extras, and importantly stores your data on RAID 1 solid state disks. Zero latency file loading so very quick indeed.

I'll be in the office all day tomorrow so please feel free to call

 

[awebapart.com]

I need the hosting for my site to be as fast as possible, as most users spend time looking at flash virtual tours. The faster the hosting, the faster the delivery (within users bb speeds obviously). I've been noticing some serious lag on my site of late, so it's time to move on.

Before you leap, do you know where the bottleneck is?

Slow response from a webserver could be caused by:

CPU
Lack of memory causing swapping
Disk I/O
The network connection
Database not optimised
Caching not used where it would help

Changing hosts *might* solve the problem, but it would be better to know why.

For your particular website, I would make an educated guess at it being the large high res zoomable and 360 pan-able images used in your 360 virtual tours that are the bottleneck. The bottleneck being the speed at which they can be downloaded from the web server, which for cheap hosting on a server with 200 other websites sharing that same network pipe on the server, would be slow. There might not have been so many sites on the server when you first started, or the websites in general have upped their page sizes, bandwidth, visitors over time, which might explain the more recent slow down.

A comment I would like to make about the hosting industry in general, is that if you require more bandwidth, or require faster bandwidth by not sharing bandwidth with so many other websites on the same server, the general solution seems to be VPS/VDS, which seems to me to be too much of a step up from shared (managed) hosting, especially if it is unmanaged. It would be nice to have other options like premium shared hosting, which is just the same as shared hosting but has less websites per server, but not many hosts seem to offer this (but here is one, openhosting, that does).

 

[360interactive]

I'm happy to say after a good chat with Dominic this morning, i've transferred the site (well, Dominic did!) over to the solid state hosting, and i'm really pleased with the extra speeds i'm seeing from the site.

Big thumbs up to Vidahost!

 

[awebapart.com]

In that case, that roughly 200 websites per server I reported yesterday might be your new hosting statistic. I looked further into this using domaintools to try and get some stats on your old server and I was getting one other server IP address (188.65.112.30 although I'm not completely sure on this) which had 1300 websites per server/IP address.

If this is the before and after situation, then I would say that moving from a server hosting 1300 websites to a server hosting 200 websites is the main reason your particular site is seeing an improvement in speed, because of the knock on effect of the server's network connection not being so strained. The SSD wouldn't affect the download speed of large images much, because regardless of the difference in SSD (solid state drive) or HDD (hard disk drive) speed, the large image file still has to pass through the much slower server network pipe, and that's what takes up the time.

 

[Dominic Taylor]

188.65.112.30 is the server with us which he's now hosted on

Your theory of many sites = slow is good but the explanation is incorrect - hosting uses very little bandwidth overall, such that a 100mbit or even 10mbit connection is fine.

The major limitation is RAM and disk i/o which is what causes the delays. SSDs eliminate this practically completely. Then we throw Nginx & gzip on top

.30 has 10 sites of note on it and the others are essentially idle ie a mix of aliases and dead domains.

The Pingdom speed test results speak for themselves (if a little conservatively too as it doesn't list the gzipped sizes etc) but for this site there's more to do - Wordpress caching, combining js with minify, etc.

Getting my clients' sites running as quickly as possible is something the geek in me enjoys!

 

[awebapart.com]

My general theory (rule of thumb) of more sites per server results in a more strained server, is a general and rough theory (rule of thumb), and there will always be exceptions to the rule. For instance a server with 1GB or 512MB RAM and a slow processor on a 10Mbps connection with only 200 sites might start feeling the strain before a server with 12GB RAM a faster or multi core processor on a 100Mbps connection with 1300 sites. Likewise it is a very rough rule of thumb because you really also need to take into account the application architecture, usage patterns, bandwidth demands and visitors numbers of every single website on the server to get an accurate picture of server strain.

The major limitation is RAM and disk i/o which is what causes the delays. SSDs eliminate this practically completely. Then we throw Nginx & gzip on top

I agree that RAM is a major bottleneck, but I would still say that bandwidth can be a bottleneck if you have a lot of sites serving heavy multi-media rich pages. I do not see how changing HDD to SDD would help with RAM limitations. I would also say that gzipping only helps on text/html/xml based files, so it can reduce overall bandwidth strain across all sites, but it wont reduce large jpg images or videos (which use their own medium specific compression and wont be compressed further with a general compression algorithm like gzip).

But if the OP has moved to your server which is hosting a lot more websites, and is seeing a speed improvement, then that is the real proof of the pudding, and I am impressed, so well done!

Getting my clients' sites running as quickly as possible is something the geek in me enjoys!

Application optimisation is something I find interesting too, whether it is getting my company's realtime 3D engines and games running on PCs or the very limited mobile phones 8 years ago, or striving to give my company's sitebuilder CMS a smaller application footprint today.

 

[awebapart.com]

The Pingdom speed test results speak for themselves

That particular full page pingdom test isn't giving the full picture, since the pingdom crawler has failed to identify that there is a 1MB flash swf in that page to download too.

But from where I'm sitting, the page does load nice and fast (1 MB flash swf included).

 

[awebapart.com]

The major limitation is RAM and disk i/o which is what causes the delays. SSDs eliminate this practically completely.

I agree that RAM is a major bottleneck... I do not see how changing HDD to SDD would help with RAM limitations.

Thinking about it further, I can see how SSD might alleviate the stress on RAM, either holistically (anything quicker, like quicker permanent storage via SSD, that speeds up processing means that process can be completed, closed and removed from memory earlier), faster virtual memory, etc.

 

[Gatorservices]

look at mariohost dot com they have discount on many servers.

 

[360interactive]

But if the OP has moved to your server which is hosting a lot more websites, and is seeing a speed improvement, then that is the real proof of the pudding, and I am impressed, so well done!

eh? The new hosting has no more than 10 large sites on it, whereas the older hosting had 1300, so shouldn't that be the other way round? Or am I being dim?!

 

[Dominic Taylor]

I think he picked up the wrong number/server combo. The server you're on has no more than 10 large sites and less than 10 sites using the SSDs so you have pretty much a whole RAID 1 SSD array to yourself

It does have lots of domains pointed to it though but those numbers are largely irrelevant and in any case incorrect too

 

[Jon236]

I have to say that Vidahost are excellent. Not only do my websites run nice and smoothly and quickly, but their approach to customer service is fantastic. Quick, friendly and accurate. I emailed them on Sunday lunchtime and had a response within 10 minutes... you can't say fairer than that! Of all the web hosts I've used over the years, Vidahost knocks spots off them all, and as my business interests expand, I know I can rely on Vidahost for my hosting.

 

[awebapart.com]

eh? The new hosting has no more than 10 large sites on it

The new server IP address has domaintools.com reverse IP reporting 1300 domains associated with that site, but that reverse IP is not always correct (as with proxy servers), and as Dominic says there are mainly 10 active/busy sites on the server...

.30 has 10 sites of note on it and the others are essentially idle ie a mix of aliases and dead domains.

whereas the older hosting had 1300, so shouldn't that be the other way round? Or am I being dim?!

I'm not sure whether it was your old server which was reporting 200 websites on it, at the time the IP address for the other server was 85.13.219.98

 

[Dominic Taylor]

We have one client with several hundred parked domains

And one with a good few hundred addon domains (separate server!) - crazy eh!

 

[british steve]

Do Vidahost have there own servers?

I am thinking about moving over to Vidahost but dont know how to move sites from one server to another, I also have a couple of wordpress sites that I would like to move over and stick on normal domains. All the sites combined get less than a few thousand hits so I dont need major webspace!

Any advice would be pretty welcome right now! Help.

 

[Seb de Lemos]

Hi Steve,

Send us an email to [email protected] and I'll see if I can sort out the site transfers for you.

 

[elaka]

Hi,

Am I missing something here?

Why does someone choose to pay &17 a month for a basic package from Vidahost ???
That's more than VPS server or a dedicated server from coolHandle.com
or $9.34 for Pro hosting from myhosting.com.
If you add the available offers you could save more than 60% on Vidahost.....

if you have a look here : evouchershopper.co.uk/vouchers-and-discounts-from-myhosting.com/ you might change your mind

 

[Dominic Taylor]

£17 per year

 

[elaka]

So this what I was missing then

 

[360interactive]

Hi,

Am I missing something here?

Yes, because for some it's not about going for the absolute cheapest available on the market.

 

[elaka]

Yes, because for some it's not about going for the absolute cheapest available on the market.

Actually coolhandle and myhosting are Not the cheapest in the market..
what I was missing was 17/Year not month

 

[Dominic Taylor]

Yes, because for some it's not about going for the absolute cheapest available on the market.

He did have a point though, £17/month for a basic hosting account would be quite expensive which is what he was querying with his comparison

Probably 5 times a week people can't believe they can host with a decent company for such a good price, after being ripped off by unscrupulous individuals running 'hosting companies'. That said we have more expensive options too so I always ask the client's budget (eg dedi servers)