Lately, the connection speeds to this website has been really pathetic, often resulting in timeouts. I can’t even connect to the dashboard, or for that matter, anything hosted on the same server. This really sucks, and my mood to blog has been more or less killed by the connection speed.
The problem lies with my host, Dreamhost. I have sent some emails to their support regarding this problem. Each time, the problem would be solved a day or 2 after the email. Yet, the same problem would come back after that, and I have to email their support again.
This is really pissing me off. I’m really bent on switching hosts, but the 6 month of hosting that I have remaining with them makes me think twice. Still, I shudder at the thought of having to last another 6 months with more than 50% downtime.
The frequent downtime and slow connection speeds have been harsh on my website’s traffic, which has dropped by more than 50%. Readers probably won’t want to wait for more than a minute or two to connect to a website.
Seriously, how can Dreamhost screw up so much that downtime occurs every couple of days? I guess I should have heeded the advice some people gave.
I’ll wait till the end of the month to make my decision. If I still get crappy speeds, I’m definitely saying goodbye.
Thank you so much Dreamhost, for giving your customer such an awesome web hosting experience.
P.S. I took almost half an hour to just to connect to my website and publish this post.
YEAH, LEAVE DREAMHOST.
Go to Fused Network
Link at the bottom of my blog. Awesome uptime, awesome customer support, awesome everything. You definitely won’t get the bandwidth and space and crap that hosts like Dreamhost and Host5 provide, but they’re a heck of a lot more reliable. Media Temple isn’t recommended either, according to Maestro.
Go with a smaller host even if it doesn’t offer as much, but make sure you read reviews on whoever you choose.
I’ve noticed that things are slow too. I’ve heard bad things about Dreamhost, particularly with connection speeds, so even with 6 months left, I’d still leave.
I had this problem with Dreamhost before but they have managed to fix the problem. At times I noticed that my Dashboard loaded slowly and people were getting timeouts on my blog as well, and I found the reason for this. If you have access to your MySQL database, check how many records are in the wp_options table. If you have something like 7000 records like I did, then that’s your problem.
The reason behind that is that WP stores a cached version of the RSS in the wp_options table. Everytime you run a query on that table, it’s trying to retrieve something like 3000 of the 7000 records. Simply clean out that table and you’ll notice the difference.
Icystorm > I’ll be looking around for more options to consider. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.
Caitlin > Yea the connection speeds suck >_>
Adun > How do you clean out the table?
I gave up on Dreamhost sometime back. Googling ‘hostname sucks’ when considering an alternative may be helpful in reducing the chance of getting an equally crappy alternative.
In the meantime, you could also get rid of overheads in your tables by optimizing them under myPHPadmin? The WP Super Cache plugin may also help to reduce server load.
How’s the web host that you’re using? Any good?
Though the site is up, the loading speed is crawling slow. I wasn’t able to load to the site for the past few days and it’s loading real slowly when I’m able to connect to the site today.
I’ve just optimized the SQL database, so I presume loading speeds will improve. That is, unless Dreamhost screws up again.
double: You have to physically delete those records from the wp-options table. Most of the records you’ll be looking for is where option_name starts with rss_. Just run this SQL statement against your database to see if it’s retrieving a lot of records:
select count(*) from wp_options
where option_name like ‘rss_%’
and autoload = ‘yes’
You can also switch to ‘no’ for autoload and see how many records are in there. Though be careful in deleting records from your database and always create a backup first.
Midphase/ANHosting has been ok but not problem free. Not the cheapest either. Do shop around.