Creativebits' webhost

Submitted by mck on Wed, 2005-12-07 20:37.

Member's Forum

Recently I have been having trouble with accessing Creativebits again. Sometimes I can get it to work, but it takes ages to load, like a 14k connection.

I have a suggestion for a new webhost: 1and1.com
I have been with them for two years, and they have never gone down (no downtime), unlike CB's host which so far has been down several times.

Also, they are constantly upgrading their facilites. One year ago I signed up for a 1 GB package, and since then they upgraded my account to 5 GB and then 10 GB at no extra cost.

I vote to go with them!

Agreed!

Submitted by JimD on Thu, 2005-12-08 18:25.

I find myself not posting or even visiting very often simply because I can't stand the constant long wait for page loads. Loading the homepage today took 20 seconds on a T-1 line here at the office. This is just hogwash. I know Ivan probably payed for a specific amount of time for the hosting (1 year?) but I would certainly review it when that contract is up.

That being said, I don't *think* I have this problem with my web host (iPowerWeb) at jdempsey.com - and I know from my web stats that I receive a large amount of visits/hits per day, so they seem to be able to handle the load (though I doubt its as many as CB at this point).

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page size

Submitted by William on Thu, 2005-12-08 19:59.

Part of the problem is just the page size.

The front page of CB is 437K !!!! and took 44 requestes to complete.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://creativebits.org/

No wonder it feels like you are on a 14k connection.

Ivan, if you are interested I can develop two scripts for you that will hugely reduce load on your server.

1. write a transparent image cache that will reduce the size of the JPEG images by reducing image quality.
2. write a RSS feed cache. Every time an RSS reader is left running it refreshes ALL it's feeds every 30 mins or so by default. Each request causes two hits to the database. The feed could be moved to a static file and regenerated every 30 mins or so. Possibly served in a pre-compressed format to.

Will
--
http://www.macscan.net/

thank you guys for the suggestions

Submitted by Ivan on Thu, 2005-12-08 22:02.

Dreamhost will move us to a dedicated server any time now. They actually promised the move for Today. Hopefully that will solve the speed problem. Also, we are going to switch to phptemplate which is a faster templating engine than xtemplate that we are currently using. The suggestion by Will is a really good one. Let's see after the move if we need to implement it. If the dedicated server doesn't solve the issue, I will promise we will move to a different hosting co.