Jason G. Designs changes web hosts
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Disclaimer: This is an affiliate sponsored post, where if you click on Hostgator’s link below, I receive a commission. However, I actually do use their product and am very satisfied with it.
Even though this blog is less than a month old, I decided to switch web hosts for Jason G. Designs from IX Web Hosting to Hostgator. Why go so far as to switch web hosts? Because from first hand experience I found WordPress, the blog system that runs this website, to operate considerably slow under IX Web Hosting’s servers.
Now, I’m not writing this post to give a bad name to IX Web Hosting, as they have served me well for several years running my static site, jgpws.com. For a dynamic site run by WordPress, I found the load times to be unacceptably slow.
At first I thought that my blog was making too many server calls, that my computer was slow and the bottleneck was on my side, that my DSL connection was too slow or that my theme’s stylesheet was too large. But two things led me to conclude that the problems were on the servers where my blog was stored.
- I switched to another theme and load times were still slow
- I asked my brother to load my blog from his computer with a very fast cable internet connection; it loaded slowly on his computer as well
Many sources say users will give between 5 and 10 seconds for a website to load before they give up and move on to another website. Think about that if you are relying on your site for e-commerce or sales. I decided to look for a tool to test the speed of my new blog and happened upon Pingdom Tools’ Test the load time of a web page page. After testing twice, my blog’s front page was clocking in at speeds of 37 seconds to load and Connection Timed Out. This was for a blog with only two posts! In addition, the admin panel in WordPress was loading even slower, sometimes with me waiting a minute for each time I clicked to a new section.
At this point, I decided it was time to switch to another web host for the blog. After research, I decided on Hostgator, which has a solid reputation in the web hosting business. Everything went over fairly smooth. Due to my lack of knowledge on how to properly migrate a WordPress installation from one web host to another, I had to reinstall my themes and plugins, which were very few. Things are working correctly now and I am very pleased with the load times of my blog– so far, so good.
If your interested in moving your blog to Hostgator, you can follow this link to their site.
What are your experiences with your web host? Satisfied? Tell your experiences in the reply section below.
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I switched to Host Gator because our previous web host was getting worse and worse. My account was often down and their tech support kept telling us there were no issues. We have a business and therefore can not afford for the business to be down. Incredible difference between our previous host and Host Gator.
We have been with Host Gator about 6 weeks. During this time frame We have not suffered one single dilemma or down time. The management panel is much more effective compared to the junk that AIT offered, we simply had little idea what had been absent. We are most certainly extremely pleased with Host Gator and their tech staff and will tend to recommend this host to everybody, without hesitation.
This is a good article. I’m a recent grad trying to learn more about the web design industry and I really enjoyed your post. It’s without a doubt worth sharing!
Great Info! But I’m having some trouble trying to load your blog. I have read it many times before and never gotten something like this, but now when I try to load something it just takes a little while (5-10 minutes ) and then just stops. I hope i don’t have spyware or something. Does anyone know what the problem could be?
Hello Best Cookbooks,
That seems odd because that was the very reason I switched web hosts! I think perhaps the blog may have been slow that particular day. Since I’ve been loading it up on my computer, it has been very fast. However, today (Sept. 10) I noticed a little slowness logging in to my admin account. Have you been back to the blog since and noticed any improvement in speed?