TSO Host & KeepAlive

[S Isaac]

I've used gtmetrix to speed test my site and the suggestion is to use KeepAlive.

I contacted TSO Host about this and they say it can only be done with their VPS @ about £40p/m

Is there any other good hosts who would allow this without the need to pay so much?

I'm keen to stay with TSO host, so if the difference in speed is only marginal, I may just stay. That said, if the speed is significant and can therefore help with SEO then it may be worth a switch.

Has anyone enabled KeepAlive and noticed a significant speed increase? if so, did you notice an SEO benefit along with it?

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Any decent host will support KeepAlive on their servers - so you don't need to have your own VPS for this.

You can mitigate this in part by using a Content Delivery Network such as CloudFlare, however the general advice is to use a host that doesn't place these restrictions.

For example from a quick search:
https://www.webpagetest.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=13711

We fairly regularly receive emails asking if we have KeepAlive enabled, often from those currently hosted with TSO Host / VidaHost

So you can always email some other providers if you do want it enabled.

You certainly shouldn't upgrade to a VPS for that alone - that's not reasonable.

You can get other benefits from moving to another provider - such as faster loading times in general, and a shorter time to first byte and general better performance from less crowded servers, a better web server, pure SSD storage rather than spinning disks and so forth.

All of this will affect performance which can in turn affect SEO as Google will give some weighting to faster loading sites. However the biggest gains are when you're moving from being punished for having a very slow loading website, to a good loading speed.

Google PageSpeed can be a good indicator for that.

User experience is often as if not more important - if your website loads slowly potential clients and customers may simply leave or convert less often.

TSO Host / VidaHost are now ultimately owned by GoDaddy and there are plenty of threads here about how their performance and service has gone downhill.

I hope that helps a little.

Best of luck,

Dan

 

[Dominic Taylor]

The frustrating thing about this question is that KeepAlive isn't hugely important. What's important is the time to first byte, ie time the server takes to send you the webpage. Since afterall KeepAlive is only useful when your browser is downloading the page contents, ie images, css, etc. If it's waiting for that then the problem is the server response time. (Which I know these tests show as well obviously)

So if your site is slow and you run a test, enabling KeepAlive seems like an easy win.

But when you move to a different/faster server, which may or may not have KeepAlive enabled, your performance gain comes from being on a better system, not just using KA. Tho yes KA does help. Even if for a while some loadbalancers eg Haproxy didn't support it because it's complex and also allows basic DoS attacks to exhaust resources more easily. Ish.

As an aisde people hardly ever noticed when I disabled KA on cPanel systems to quickly deal with basic DoS attempts, because the ones with local SSDs were so damn quick.

 

[S Isaac]

KA is showing at the main bottleneck for our site. Other than that, it scores reasonably well, but was looking for a bit of an improvement.

TSO host was very well regarded when I first joined them, some 4 or 5 years ago. I guess it's time to look around for a new host. Not sure what the main things to look for are, so a bit of research required there I guess.

I tried AMP plugin, which seemed to make no difference at all. Possibly due to having picked a good 'light' responsive theme?

 

[The next Steve Jobs]

Keep Alive explained

https://blog.stackpath.com/glossary/keep-alive/

 

[webhostuk]

TSO host was very well regarded when I first joined them, some 4 or 5 years ago. I guess it's time to look around for a new host. Not sure what the main things to look for are, so a bit of research required there I guess.

As suggested keepalive is not a big deal, It can be enabled we do for our customers on shared hosting. Regarding TSO now they are part of Godaddy so you can expect such changes this guys like upgrading customers .