For the last year I’ve complained about the Family Roots Publishing website having a case of the “slows.” Not all the time, but every once in a while I found that I could leave the room and get a bite to eat while waiting for a page to open. I’d call the customer support number at my web hosting service and inevitably the page would open about the time I got a support person on the phone – and I was always assured that nothing was wrong… Yeh… Right…
Several weeks ago the site went down. I found out that my hosting service had done a php upgrade and didn’t tell me ahead of time. For a number of days we fought to fix code that was broken during the upgrade. We finally got everything working properly last week. Then I got a call from a salesman. He explained that although the service techs wouldn’t admit it, my “slows” problem was all being caused by my having my site hosted on a shared server. I suspected this in the past, but no one at the hosting service would admit it. It comes down to the fact that if most companies using a shared server have little business, then site access is fine. But – if one of the companies takes off and has lots of traffic, server access slows down. If several companies sharing the server have lots of traffic, access can slow even further – and nearly stop. It seems that was what happened with the server FamilyRootsPublishing.com was using.
The fix was easy… I just paid more money, and upgraded my server to to a VPS – or Virtual Private Server. So – I’m still sharing a server, but there’s only a couple companies doing it, and not hundreds. Access is great. There’s no more waiting for pages to open. I’m happy and I’m sure the FamilyRootsPublishing.com customers will be also. Check it out.
