Would moving from Ricky to Tommy improve Server Response Time?

[kjwed]

Hi there,

 

First of all, thank you so much for what you're providing! It's a huge help and you can't argue with the price not only for the service but for the support. I definitely appreciate how much you're all doing.

 

I've been having some trouble with the website on my account: joelandkendra.com. The website always takes at least five or six seconds to respond, even when attached to Cloudflare. I think the term is Time To First Byte, but I could be mistaken-- when you try to access the site in Firefox, you get the status "Waiting for joelandkendra.com" for several seconds before anything happens. Older visitors in particular think they've done something wrong on their end and don't end up being able to access the site.

 

It's a wordpress site, I've been spending a lot of time on google page insights and similar sites, optimizing things as much as possible in terms of caching, using Cloudflare as a CDN, and if anything it seems to get worse, disabling and re-enabling plugins, optimizing images etc. The end result does seem to make the site all load at once quite nicely when it finally responds, but it isn't helping the initial delay. I've now disabled all those tweaks and changed the nameservers back and am not seeing a huge difference. I'm wondering if the root cause lies with the host machine.

 

The site lives on Ricky, and I understand Tommy more sophisticated machine. I found the donation-request page explaining how to move to Tommy. Can you tell whether there would be a noticeable improvement in this problem if I migrated? I don't need the initial load time down to milliseconds, but I'd like something to appear within the two or three if possible.

 

One last thing I've noticed - the delay is noticeably worst the very first time you access the website. It gets better after that (browser caching?). Not sure if that helps.

 

Thank you!

[Krydos]

Tommy is faster than Ricky, but even the greatest server can't work miracles on a slow wordpress site. In my experience wordpress is just really slow, buggy, and full of vulnerabilities. Pretty much anything else is faster.

 

If you insist on sticking with wordpress the next biggest culprit on speed is plugins. A lot of them are terribly designed, really slow, full of vulnerabilities, and a lot of the free ones are simply malware. Try disabling some plugins to see if that speeds up your site.

 

You can also check out a website like http://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/ with a checklist of things to try. It sounds like you may have already been down a few of these lists though.

 

If you want to move to Tommy we can move your site for you with minimal downtime for as little as $1.00 USD. If you think our service is worth more we recommend donating what you feel is appropriate. We've only had one person ever complain about Tommy being too slow, and honestly that guy was completely bonkers. He also said that Amazon Web Services was worthless for a production website because it was too slow, so take his criticism with a very large grain of salt.

[kjwed]

Heh, the reddit sub r/rwordpress seems to disagree with you, but, you know, of course they would.

 

I've just sent in a donation (more than $1, appreciate the offer to do something for so little), transaction ID 1P643387LM2272455. Let me know if/when I need to do anything else to facilitate the transfer. We haven't told anyone the site is up yet so downtime is not an issue, though the sooner I can show I fiancee that our site is working better, the happier I'll be.

 

Thanks again!

[Byron]

The email address you donated with shows you already have an account on tommy with the username: jptiger

 

Your only allowed one account with us unless you have special permission to have two.

[kjwed]

....that's news. but I guess it makes sense. I'd argue that this is more for Kendra, but Joel was the one who donated (and has another account).

 

I guess we can move the Ricky site to Joel's Tommy account (jptiger), We don't need a gig of space for each one. What's the best way to set up the top-level domains to point to each website?

[wolstech]

Assuming this is a domain you own, you can back up and delete your ricky account then add the domain that was on Ricky to the Tommy account as an addon domain. Then use the backup to upload the content into the folder you specified when you created the addon domain.

 

If your site is using one of our heliohost.org subdomains, you'll need to create a subdomain of one of your existing domains instead and let us know what it is. We'll add the heliohost.org subdomain to it for you.

[kjwed]

I'm actually realizing because of wordpress that this is going to be a much more complicated operation because of the references in the SQL database to specific locations of files (in the root rather than a new subfolder).

 

I can do this, but if you're willing, I'd much rather appeal regarding the one person, one account rule. This is Joel writing to be clear, as I have the amateur web design experience, but Kendra registered the account under her own user name and email address. If you look at the website (and are willing to wait for it to load) you can see that she is a real person. She in fact created much of the non-technical content. I am going to be the person doing most of the back-end work on the site, and yes I did make the donation rather than ask her to do it for expediency, but for the purposes of the rules, can we just count this account as hers? I'd really appreciate it if we could just stick to that. If you're worried about disk space, maybe you could knock our space caps to 500MB each. I don't think we need more.

Edited April 10, 2018 by kjwed

[wolstech]

The disk space limit is the big reason we forbid multiple accounts. Since you're fine with not getting the space, what email address do you want the account under since the one you donated from is already used (or would you rather me move the Ricky account, in which case please let me know the username)?

 

I'll reduce the space quota for your existing account to 500MB, and once you make the second one (or I move the Ricky account), I'll make that one 500MB as well.

[kjwed]

If you can move the existing Ricky account, that'd be great. I'm posting from the username now (kjwed).

 

If I eventually close one of the accounts, can I get the other moved back to 1000MB?

[kjwed]

Actually, sorry, hold on that last request, I think I found a WP plugin that would make moving the site simpler. If I'm right, I can transfer the site to my main account and delete the duplicate. Will post here or edit this post after.

[kjwed]

Got it. and it looks like it's going to work. I've cued this account (kjwed) for deletion.

 

I see my regular account, jptiger, has had its disk quota limited to 500MB. Can I please have it restored to 1000MB?

[wolstech]

Quota has been restored.

 

Do you want me to merge the forum accounts so these posts belong to jptiger now (the forum account kjwed will cease to exist, you'll log into the forums as jptiger if I do this)?