I got an email from Fred of One Project Closer this weekend, outlining how he had handled improving the load time of his blog, and I was so happy with it that I asked whether I could post it online, to which he graciously agreed. So you can now read it in full:
Joost,
I wanted to pass along a HUGE thank you for pointing me in the direction of VPS.Net.
About 2 weeks ago we decided it was time to move off of our Dreamhost shared hosting. I had remembered visiting your site several months back and seeing your note in the sidebar for a fast WordPress hosting solution. When we decided to move 2 weeks ago, I sought out your site again.
In a matter of two weeks we have:
1) switched to VPS.Net
2) optimized with Litespeed
3) installed W3 Total Cache
4) signed up for and started delivering via a CDN.
5) started to optimize our code every way we can.Our home page load times are down to less than 4 seconds from 10-11 seconds on Dreamhost. We saw an INSTANT increase in our affiliate conversions on some pages which will make the VPS.Net solution pay for itself in no time…
I’m now on a mission to optimize the heck out of the rest of our code — moving more to the CDN and figuring out how to keep our rich presentation but streamlining the delivery.
Your site speed is an inspiration. I’m looking forward to figuring out ways to squeeze every last drop of waste out of our loads.
I hope to get to meet you sometime and share our story.
Thanks,
Fred
It’s great to see how people improve their sites just by taking my freely given advice. He’s also very right about affiliate money paying for the somewhat more expensive hosting fees. I’ll tell you this time and again: you get what you pay for… If you’ve got a story like this to tell, please do share it with me! Either through my contact form or through the comments below!
Very nice. When I ran YSlow on my site recently, I got low scores for not using a CDN. I’m going to have to look more into that and start taking this a lot more seriously.
Wow..I will be running a test on my blog to today..Hope I score well..
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Awesome to see. Glad it’s working out Fred!
Joost, thanks again for pointing us in a good direction. Nick, your team has been very helpful. I appreciate the effort that’s gone into getting us moved and working with us to get the kinks out.
I too am hosting my blogs on vps.net with and using Akamai as CDN, because I read about it on your blog. I think vps.net should be quite content about having you as an affiliate!
Hi I looked at vps but i think you need to make it clear that you need to be quite technical to use it, I mean linux technical not just a wiz at windows.
Also I confused about is there any support, in the FAQ it states:
Do you offer Managed Services?
VPS.NET does offer an optional Managed Services plan for a monthly fee of £69 with a £30 setup fee, this gives you pro-active managed support help for the setup and management of your VPS.
Now does this mean you need to pay for support? Maybe Nick could clarify what support is included in the base price and what this covers.
The vps.net service does look good, but i think it might be scary for those of us used to your standard shared hosting control panel.
Hi Brian,
I think the best people to speak to this will be Fred, and the rest of the crew who have joined VPS.NET.
Our support is top notch, we will handle your complete setup and migration, then after that, there’s two three options..most popular is for you to support yourself as much as you can through cPanel, and then if there’s basic questions you can submit a free ticket, or if you need us to do a sysadmin task, you can submit a $10 “admin ticket” – otherwise you can also buy management.
Most people get away with never having to spend money on support, we’ll do most everything through our free tickets.
Give us a shot, drop me an email…we’ll take care of you.
VPS offers cpanel or ISPmanager set ups, so you don’t need to be a code cruncher to get going. I started that way, but eventually taught myself the basics of ubuntu and so on, and now running my server through that. there are tons of tutorials online on how to do basic setups for very good optimization… and with many linux setups coming in packages such as DEBS, RPMS and so on, its like dropping in modules and turning it on and off, with only a few requiring some customization. Give them a try in my opinion. VPS is a very flexible host and im honestly not sure where I would go else for VPS type setups, and even dedicated services such as RackSpace or ServerBeach are so limited in their offerings…
Ok thanks for the info Nick. Re: sysadmin task, you can submit a $10 “admin ticket”.
So that would cover i broke/can’t do this small jobs?
Please be clear i am not trying to be ackward, it’s just i think you need to be clearer with your charges on the site, as its not very clear at the moment.
Your prices are great and i know you need to cover your costs its just i think potential customers like to see as much info and transparency as possible or we get suspicious that there is hidden charges or catches.
Thanks for getting back to me.
Brian, I can testify that Nick is telling the truth here. His team migrated us for free (I understand this was because we went with the 6 node option, otherwise it is $49.00). They have also helped with the few issues that have come up. For example, I set a CNAME record incorrectly in the Managed DNS section because I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing. Their support team handled it in < 2 hours and explained what I did wrong (all using a "free" ticket). I can tell you that paying $10.00 to get something fixed is dirt cheap and I'm more than willing to pay it if I run into something that would require it, but have been impressed so far with what they will do for free.
Hey Fred – Good job! The Handyguys made a move earlier this year (not to VPS). We too saw a big increase in performance. We went from a shared server bare bones hosting plan to one a little more scalable at a different host. The additional tools alone made it worthwhile. I know our page load times are not ideal but we haven’t had any complaints. When we tweaked the site to push out video I was more concerned with functionality than performance. I guess its now time to squeeze better page load times from what we have. We have to try and keep up with our friends at One Project Closer ya know.
This was a good read. Thanks for sharing Fred and Yoast.
I know Fred was using Shared hosting, but being a happy customer of BOTH VPS.Net and Dreamhost Private Servers (which is their name for VPS), I just wanted to note that the same result could definitely be achieved with Dreamhost. They now offer an access level which is more or less root, so you can install whatever services you like (also have nginx and lighttpd availble in the control panel.)
Price is comparable, and support for each is great. VPS.Net support is quite a bit faster to respond, however DH support will help with more application-level issues if you ask them.
Re: Yoast.com load time – I have this set up as a benchmark in mon.itor.us and I hope to beat it soon!
In my opinion, why pay for an optimization tool when you can use a setup such as php with php-fpm and HTTP static/dynamic content handling. Mix that in with some form of opcode (APC, eaccelerator, etc) and you will end up paying a bit less for very similar or even better results versus LiteSpeed. I myself do host with VPS.NET and used to pay maybe US $62 a month (cause I was lazy and set up cPanel, and then threw in LiteSpeed after Apache just didn’t want to execute fast enough). However, it just wasn’t cutting it, so I ditched it all, did a completely new set up on Ubuntu and set up PHP-FPM/NGINX/APC/CDN with MaxCDN and now pay just $38 for hosting …. that’s just 2 nodes though. So 62 vs 38… clearly a savings for me. I guess with more nodes, the cost difference would be less marginal…but still worth it in my opinion.
Im impressed with it’s ability to handle traffic, because I usually get between 1000-13000 hits per day and the charts show barely any huge spikes in CPU/Memory processing power.
Anyway, my rant is over… just mentioning the alternatives :P
I’m glad to see and try other cheaper solution. Can you give me some tips on what you did? You’ve followed some guidelines?
I liked this post and i’ll surely come back