Website Hosting Speed Tips

There seems to be the preconceived notion that a small website hosting provider’s infrastructure could never stack up against the big players of the Internet. However, that’s just not the case with CloudFlare FREE.

ROCKHOST.COM, Inc. boasts over a 99.99% combined uptime in 2019. Watch live network activity through operational transparency and monitor detailed I/O, RAM, and CPU server statistics globally or on the individual account level in cPanel. Does your host provide this information? Or hide it? And why or why not? Hosting goes far beyond tier 1 data transfer and SSD disk space.

Regardless, hardware can only get you so far. The following is a list of tips, tricks and tweaks to further increase website hosting performance whether you are hosting in Mom’s basement or the cloud.

CloudFlare Caching

With all the buzz going on you might be asking yourself what is CloudFlare FREE and what can it do for my site? Well, CloudFlare is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches images and distributes files to dozens of points of presence (POP) nodes around the world. 

So, in laymen’s terms, not only can CloudFlare speed up your site through file caching and location, but by doing so it saves bandwidth and lightens resource usage on the origin server. As if that’s not enough CloudFlare mitigates DDOS attacks and protects your website. All for free!

PHP Upgrade

cPanel introduced the MultiPHP Manager and MultiIPHP INI Editor in a recent update. What this means for end users is that switching between PHP versions just got a whole lot easier. Want to speed up your site? PHP upgrades result in faster performance and tighter security. If the update breaks the site simply revert to the previous php version with the MultiPHP Manager and troubleshoot without anxiety.

Enable the “display_error” directive in the MultiPHP INI Editor to print errors to the browser. I find many times the error is the answer or at the very least a clue in solving the problem. For WordPress admins increasing the “upload_max_filesize” directive is often the fix for failed media library uploads.

Database Optimization

The speed of your website depends on a healthy database. When queries take too long visitors become impatient. A common example of this would be a spam ridden or revision heavy WordPress installation. If MySQL / MariaDB must parse thousands of extra table rows or columns delivery time may suffer.

Ever notice how PayPal loads slowly right before a scheduled maintenance window alert appears under the notification bell? Database optimization is taking place which locks entire tables or individual table rows (InnoDB engine) leaving them temporarily inaccessible.

Apache Compression

By clicking a few buttons and enabling the “Optimize Website” feature in cPanel (our control panel of choice), the Apache web server automatically compresses selected file types before returning http(s) requests to browsers. Thus, resulting in quicker load times.

Minimizing total HTTP requests per page is also a savvy way to speed up load times. If your website requests too many files or WordPress plugins it is likely going to be slower than the average.