Reseller better than VPS for fast Wordpress

[jamesunique]

One way or another I've been working for a couple of weeks trying to get my Wordpress installations to perform/respond quickly on my VPS service.

Following complaints from my customers and notification to them from Google that their page rank was being adversely affected by slow pageload times on sites hosted on my VPS, I had a major problem on my hands ...

I'm not sure that support understood the problem as their systems didn't show the problem. The usual things were tried such as re-starting services etc. I won't go into too much detail unless someone wants me to but here it is.

On VPS site MYWORDPRESSSITE would hang for up to 4 minutes or more before the first page would load. Subsequent pageloads would generally be quicker (probably down to caching) but would also 'hang' on occasion. Generally I was getting 12s -18s pageloads.

I decided to migrate all my VPS sites to a re-seller account on the basis that any Wordpress sites I had running on shared hosting ran quickly with fast initial and subsequent pageloads. From what I understand, re-seller is largely the same as shared but with bigger file upload limits and probably a few other bonusses.

On RESELLER the migrated site MYWORDPRESSSITE runs quickly with no initial pageload hanging and generally 3s pageloads

In short - get reseller hosting for multiple client wordpress installs, not VPS !

Note:

When discussing this with sales, they did their anticipated job of trying to sell me a Dedicated server at 4 times the price or more of reseller - I think the salesperson didn't understand the nature of the problem I was having at best, at worst, just wanted commission.

I contacted chat support following the migration out of courtesy so that they could compare performance between a migrated site on re-seller and one still on the VPS - again, I don't think they understood that I was trying to help (assuming a VPS should perform better under normal circumstances than reseller).

I'm now happy with reseller for the moment but time will tell.

[Kieran]

Hi Chris.

Let me explain your doubts and the reasons why your wordpress sites are loading quickly on the shared server but not on VPS.

There should not any problem to install and run wordpress CMS on VPS if the recommended server ( hardware resources) and software ( LAMP) requirements are met. However, performance is affected by server configuration and volume of sites and visitors.

Of course our sales person, do their anticipated job to sale Dedicated, VPS server for those who have performance or up time issue in terms of appropriate hosting plans, but they do understand and have experience of such problems. They do suggest appropriate servers only after system administrator and tech's confirmation.

Shared hosting, VPS and Dedicated servers have their own advantages and disadvantages.
These include, security, customization, access and resources restriction and performance.

Our all shared servers are fully managed, optimized and configured to meet latest application requirements. we do same with VPS and dedicated server but it depends on clients requirements and server configuration.

There are limitations on the shared server for memory limit, upload limit and other functions which do affect server security and performance but no exact CPU limitation which might beneficial in some cases. As shared server are set up on high configuration servers and running with bunch of RAM, your site might load fast but would be suspended if it constantly found overloading the server resources.

VPS have less resources as compare to shared and dedicated server but those are totaly allocated to your sites only. Also you get your own configuration and customization on the VPS or dedicated server.

For more information and comparison between shared, VPS and Dedicated server, please refer following article from our blog.

VPS Hosting vs. Dedicated Server Hosting | Official Web Hosting Blog by eUKhost Ltd.

I have worked on some of the WP performance issues and noticed that themes, plugins and database size mostly affects sites speed. Also the HTTP requests (visitors volume) is main factor for the performance.

I would recommend you to PM me or put an email at support[@]eukhost.com and
provide domain name with the CPanel login details. We will install WP on it and monitor performance for few hours on your VPS. Also we will try to tweak and apply some recommended settings on your VPS if any.

Regards,
Kieran A.

[jamesunique]

Hi Kieran,

Yes, I understand your commentary and would entirely agree with you If it weren't for the fact the sites on my VPS were new in most cases and regardless of traffic level which was low in all cases, the sites ran terribly slowly - By direct comparison, the same sites migrated to re-seller went from initial pageloads of 12s (and occasionally several minutes) to 2 seconds constistently.

Without having the in-depth knowledge, I can only make a comparison on experienced performance having spent hours of support time on getting the VPS to 'behave'

I will stick to my recommendation based on experience and hope that no issues arise in terms of server load - I would be surprised if the worlds most popular CMS did cause problems.

I now base almost all my websites on Wordpress, even if my clients don't need the CMS element due to the cost effective availability of themes, modules and functionality. - why re-invent the wheel (I spent years doing that already)

I can see a service opportunity for eukhost to provide a hosting package/service specifically for website deployers* such as myself providing re-seller functionality but specifically optimised for Wordpress - this could include GZIP as a feauture and various other optimisations that will improve Google pageload ranking.
Other optimisations should include the removal of suhosin by default which locks users out of the admin area and the changing or removal of mod security which knocks out the flash uploader. This would also provide an opportunity to specifically tighten up security for wordpress installs.

*I wouldn't consider myself a 'developer' as at I only tweak css, configure themes and make minor code modifications to suit the job

[Kieran]

Hi Chris.

I have checked your VPS configuration and monitored resources usages, network traffics on VPS IPs. Neither I did find anything wrong with your server nor there was recorded issue on the same NODE.

Let me know if you still have any doubt or query in this regards.

Regards,
Kieran A.

[jamesunique]

Hi Keiran,

That's my point, despite hardly any load, the VPS was serving pages Very slowly, could have been all manner of issues but we couldn't find a specific solution.

The sites are running great on the Reseller which were previously running on the VPS with issues.

I'm happy with the move to reseller from VPS so far and will cancel the VPS in the next days as it's no longer needed. I think it's potentially a shame the VPS couldn't be made to work for whichever reason as the extra control was handy along with GZIP and extra upload capacity.

I do think (for the moment) that anyone wanting to run multiple customer Wordpess sites, they should use Reseller. (There's not much of a price difference)

There is good reason to research this further from your point of view as people may review/label a VPS as poor, without having gone through the process I have. A VPS is probably great for static html sites or as online file storage but perhaps not for database driven cms sites.

[Rsync]

Hi Keiran,

That's my point, despite hardly any load, the VPS was serving pages Very slowly, could have been all manner of issues but we couldn't find a specific solution.

The sites are running great on the Reseller which were previously running on the VPS with issues.

I'm happy with the move to reseller from VPS so far and will cancel the VPS in the next days as it's no longer needed. I think it's potentially a shame the VPS couldn't be made to work for whichever reason as the extra control was handy along with GZIP and extra upload capacity.

I do think (for the moment) that anyone wanting to run multiple customer Wordpess sites, they should use Reseller. (There's not much of a price difference)

There is good reason to research this further from your point of view as people may review/label a VPS as poor, without having gone through the process I have. A VPS is probably great for static html sites or as online file storage but perhaps not for database driven cms sites.

Hello Chris,

I have done some optimization. Can you please check your VPS performance now and let me know the results.

[jamesunique]

Hi Rsync,

that's much better from what I can see - I've moved most of the sites to reseller now (having bought it as a replacement for the VPS but the remaining sites appear to fly along now.

It's just a shame we didn't find the solution before I moved everything onto the reseller package.

I hope you can make use of the optimisation settings for future customers as it's now too late for me (not much point in moving everything back from reseller to VPS now).

Thank you very much for your efforts.