Contribute Fridays: New Host!
After some terrible experience with my GoDaddy host when I started receiving high amounts of traffic, (I’ve had them for 5+ years with no problem before) I finally decided to switch hosts. It’s next to impossible to figure out what host to go with, because a bunch of people will mention one is great, and the same number of people will say it’s terrible. I didn’t have the money to spend on a dedicated, since I don’t make any advertising money from the blog – yet.
A lot of people mentioned how great BlueHost is, and they’re offering unlimited data transfer and disk space for $4 a month. After transferring the site, it’s load time was cut by around 60%, but still taking 13 seconds to load. Apparently a lot of the “optimization” techniques I had tried from reading a WordPress Optimization post was what was slowing my site down.
So ta-da welcome to the faster, zippier, happier AmberWeinberg.com! (It is faster for you, right? 
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About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Went from 15 seconds to less than a second! Good job Amber!
Nice to see all your hard work pay off, eh?
It’s faster! What did you do that slowed your site down? What sort of optimization? And what did you do to speed it up besides changing hosts? My site is on Godaddy and I also use Media Temple for my other site.
Well besides the host, minify was the next biggest thing slowing it down. It’s supposed to speed it up but in my case it REALLY slowed it down. I’m also using timthumb for the preview images, so it was loading like 1500px images, so I had to resize those.
Oh ok. Thanks for the info. I also had to take out minify as it seemed to do more harm than good. I’m also using timthumb. I also had a missing png image that was actually really tiny but my site load was hanging on it forever. I am still having slowness a bit but still working on it. I run my twitter feed on my homepage and I think that slows it down. I might end up dumping it to see if that fixes it. gzip compression seemed to help. Have you noticed anything with that or are you using it?
No I’m not using it, what is it? All this optimization stuff is new to me, because most themes I do don’t need it. Didn’t realize this site was so resource intensive.
Here i a link about gzip. http://bit.ly/4JeD8g
Now that I have cleaned up everything on my site I turned it off. LOL.
would you mind sharing some of the reasons for choosing Bluehost over other choices? I can’t imagine you based it entirely off price alone! Bluehost seems to be the one host that my clients using it don’t complain about, most everyone else has something negative to say about their host, but not from my Blue clients!
Sure. I chose it because a lot of people on Twitter told me it was a great host and they’ve never had problems with it. The price was just a bonus, I almost went with Media Temple ($20 a month) but there were a lot of negative comments about it, so I decided to try the cheapest one first, and then if that didn’t work go from there. So far BlueHost has been great, very zippy and now I have a full cPanel and my own mail server.
thanks for the follow up. I’m on the same fence with MT, they’re attractive but they also seem to have the most negative feedback. Thanks for your input!
To throw a cinder block in your fire, I host my blogs with Tubu. Check out their deal at http://bloghost.me and/or http://tubu.net if you prefer web hosting plans. I have one of each….and the cost is much less than $4 a month with awesome customer service.
Thank you for this post. I’m currently using BlueHost as my web host and so far, they seem to be pretty good. I’m not sure, though, what other people’s opinions are about the specifications of the hosting plan they offer, as with some hosts, you may get more.