Your WordPress Website: How to Tell When It’s Time for a New Hosting Company.

Last week, I finally realized I outgrew my hosting company and hosting plan, and spent the last 2 days moving everything to another hosting company. Not fun. You see, what worked well for my oddodesign.com website, was not suitable for my WordPress blog. Why? Well, my oddodesign.com website does not pull data from a database like a WordPress website or blog must do. And why does that matter? Because if your database server is slow, it means your WordPress web pages will load slowly, and your traffic will decline.

One way to check the health of your WordPress site/blog is to use a tool like: ismyblogworking.com. If it reports that your blog/website is slow, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your hosting provider is at fault. So, first, you’ll want to try a few things…

• Backup WordPress and upgrade to the latest version, and test;
• Update all of your plugins, and test;
• Check for slow feeds that may be slowing down the loading of your pages;
• Disable your WordPress plugins and reactivate them, one by one, until you find the culprit;
• Check your PHP “memory_limit” via phpinfo.php; consider increasing it if you can, and test;
• Optimize your database, and finally;
• Try using a plugin like SuperCache to create static pages of your site.

If none of these things have much impact on the performance of your WordPress site, and tech support tells you there is nothing they can do, chances are, their servers are overloaded (i.e., they have too many customers and not enough “bandwidth”). For the average user, some of these low-cost plans (e.g., NetworkSolutions‘ “nsHosting Shared Package”) are fine, except if your website pulls data from a database (like WordPress does). Yes— you do get what you pay for.

In my case, I was told flat out, that they (NetworkSolutions) were aware of the problem, and if I wanted better (i.e., reasonable) performance, I’d have to upgrade to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), which would have been twice the monthly cost and more power and flexibility than I really need at this time. Quite frankly, I wasn’t seeking anything out of the ordinary— I just wanted my WordPress pages to load before my visitors left (I had evidence that this was happening). So, I decided to give another hosting company, mediatemple.net (a.k.a. “mt”), a try.

So far, my WordPress site loads much faster— and without any caching plugins. I’m also very impressed with their tech support. True, I’m paying a little more for hosting, but considerably less than what I’d pay for a VPS solution. As far as I’m concerned, Network Solutions’ performance was simply unacceptable… it’s a lot like buying a car that only has one speed— slow.

Tommy Oddo is a web designer and digital artist who lives in Austin, Texas. Entrepreneurs, marketers, and in-house teams hire him to make their websites and digital products more engaging and easier to use. Follow him on: Linkedin, Quora, Twitter, and Facebook. Subscribe to future articles via RSS and/or Email.