Blog Hosting Speed
Choosing top quality website hosting now has an additional factor to consider! Introduced into the equation by Google, SPEED has now become a deciding factor along with cost & reliability.
I did an article back in November 2009 on Blog Hosting , but now thanks to Google I needed to write a revision on that article, to include some very important points!
You see not all hosting services / companies are created equally, some make a big deal with lots of glitzy adverts, telling you that their package includes unlimited storage (rarely needed) or unlimited bandwidth (rarely needed) or unlimited databases (yeah yeah rarely needed), but doesn’t it all look good eh..?
All this unlimited stuff is a pure gimmick & nothing more, it is designed to make you feel like your getting value for money, whilst behind the scenes a few of the more crucial aspects of web hosting are being disabled without you even knowing.
Examples Of What You Really Need
Example 1. Diy Computer Repairs
This site is 15 months old & has disk space usage of only 126.08mb & bandwidth of almost 2.5gb with 4 days till the end of the month!
Hardly any need for all that unlimited storage & bandwidth wouldn’t you agree..?
Example 2. My Blog Review
This site is coming up 8 months old & has disk space usage of only 58.43mb & bandwidth of just over 2gb with 4 days till the end of the month! Yet again hardly any need for all that unlimited storage & bandwidth, other than to try and justify a higher price to YOU the punter.
Ok now having shown you what is not really all that important, now lets look at what has become extremely important!
Run A Test On Your Blog Using YSlow
Thanks to our dear friends at Google, we must now take into account site speed / load times when choosing our hosting service & I’ll bet there are many of you out there sat scratching your heads wondering what the hell has site speed got to do with the hosting service that you choose..?
Well two of the most decisive factors in being able to speed up your website or blog, is the ability to set far future headers for certain files & also to be able to set Gzip compression. Without these two mods being enabled on your hosting service, your going to be fighting a losing battle. Just take a test run using YSlow or Page Speed from Google & see what the report says..?
The report goes something like this;
Grade F. Make fewer http requests (this is because of all the junk on your page, eg buttons to various other sites like mybloglog, blogup, topblog, google custom search, adsense etc etc)
Grade F. Use a CDN (CDN = content delivery network) similar results can be achieved by using a sub-domain on your own account to host such files as images / java / css.
Grade F. Add expires headers (this gives a long list of files that require this)
Grade F. Compress components with Gzip (again a long list of files to compress)
Now that is just the first 4 you are likely to see, there are in fact 22 categories that will be reported on, but these 4 are in my opinion the most critical & the ones that produce the best results when implemented.
This all seems fairly straight forward untill you try and enable gzip compression or expires headers, you could then discover that your cheap & nasty hosting service does not & will not activate additional Server Mods.
The reason for this is that if you are on shared hosting, as the vast majority of us are, then these companies squeeze every last available resource out of a server, in order to get the best return on investment. Therefore by enabling such things as Gzip for example, can put a greater than expected load on the CPU, which if it was only YOU, would probably be ok, but shared hosting is not just YOU! Very often it could mean hundreds & possibly more than a thousand other accounts all on the same server & all taking a share of available resources..?
So my friends, do not let the hosting companies dazzle you with useless trimmings that you are unlikely to ever use, instead ask them the more prying questions like;
1. Can I have gzip, deflate or zlib compression enabled on my account…?
2. Can I have expires headers (far future expires) enabled on my account..?
If the answer to either of these questions is NO! then I would suggest you look elsewhere for a top quality hosting service.
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Posted by Steve (Admin)
on Apr 26 2010. Filed under Blog Tips.
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