Best Bang for Buck: Improve Hosting Speed?

[Name Trader]

OK. What is the best bang for you buck to improve the speed of your vps/dedicated hosting?

Change CPU
Add more Cores
Add more RAM
Change to ECC RAM
Change HDD to SDD
Upgrade Port to 1GB
Anything else?

 

[techie474]

Thanks @vivaldi

 

[DU]

if you need to use one more apache module to accomplish that simple task that just says a lot about quality of your code

Most people don't write code. Most people buy solutions.

If someone complains their commute from the suburbs to the city are too slow. You're advice is to Stage-3 their commuter car... where others say take a park and ride train.

 

[iowadawg]

Something left out here....
If you have images (like affiliate banners, etc) served from elsewhere, that could be a big reason pages slow down on delivery.
Plus ad networks like adsense, chitika, etc. can also slow down delivery of pages.
Just something to think about.

 

[N-A]

I analyze my sites straight from Google. This gives me a better idea than using other tools such as Pingdom, etc. as it gives me constructive feedback of what Google wants for brownie points in their algorithm.

XX/XX refers to Mobile/Desktop - I think I've only seen one website with 100/100. That's nearly impossible as you need to get below a 200 millisecond latency and DNS alone can take more than that, with Anycast and a CDN.

Mobile can be lower because it can be picky with how links are closer together and it may give the end user a bad experience as they're trying to click "About Us", but it keeps going to the "Contact Us" page (right next to it in the navigation).

There are several other factors than just this that are analyzed on both platforms. I believe that even though they don't let you select a server or device to test from, they are doing it from specific locations and devices as well. I've came to that conclusion because you must wait 30 seconds between tests, I see the Googlebot using different user agents accessing my site and the scores will bounce around (+/-), even though nothing has changed.

A typical minisite will have a 96/98 score after everything Google suggests is corrected, and that's because it's out of my control. Google wants me to leverage browser caching. So, I did. However, running it again, they want me to leverage browser caching on AdSense and Analytics. In other words, they dock you points for not doing that (which you could, but would be against the TOS).

Either way, I see my position in the search engines higher following their constructive feedback and fixing everything (in my case, doing it once and automatically using an Apache module mod_pagespeed).

From my first test in the mid 60's/70's to 98/99, I saw a 1 to 3 page jump once crawled again for certain keywords. I remain in the same spots.

It leads me to believe that Google is putting Page Rank high on the pedestal as it does give the user the best possible experience. Everything they see loads first and quickly, while what they won't see for another second is still rendering.

 

[techie474]

Thanks @David Walker for all that useful info.

 

[discobull]

I have a vps run multiple scripts per day for sorting through pre-release and dropping domains lists. When I switched from hdd to sdd, the processing times dropped from 2 - 3 hours per script to about 15 minutes each. Not sure how much bearing that has on your particular situation ( sorry, didn't read the entire thread ), but thought it was worth mentioning that that can make a significant difference.

 

[Paul]

mod_pagespeed is pretty powerful. Its output is pretty much illegible--it's not quality code; it's just smaller, so it transmits faster. It makes various other optimizations as well based on Google's performance observations over the years. It's designed for Apache because sites on Apache tend to be the least optimized. Developers who put time and expertise into optimization steer clear of Apache in the first place. Its multithreading techniques are primitive and outdated.

If you're looking to increase your speed, it really depends what sort of slowdown you're observing. Typically growing websites/servers first start to notice problems with MySQL, especially when they're using large, heavyweight frameworks like WordPress. The key to optimizing MySQL in these cases is usually more RAM, but you can't just throw memory at it and expect it to work better: you have to tune your database and engine settings accordingly. In most cases it's important that you use InnoDB as your engine for each table, not MyISAM. It's also important that you allocate as much RAM as possible to various InnoDB caches. Fine-tuning InnoDB/MySQL is a complex process that is best explained by people who special in that area; there are some nice blog posts about the topic floating around the internet. Note that under certain circumstances, mod_pagespeed and easy-to-use CDN services like CloudFlare can help take some of the load off your MySQL server.

Edit: I should note that tuning MySQL sounds scary at first, but it's pretty easy to do as long as you do your reading and follow the directions of the experts. Switching from MyISAM to InnoDB is also easy if you have something like phpMyAdmin.

 

[Soofi]

Some great insight from David & Paul. Thanks for starting the thread Stub.

I am responding here to bookmark this