You may want to pay more attention to how quickly pages load on your website. Google announced on Friday that it is using site speed in calculate search result ranking. Faster sites rank higher.
Performance tuning is a deep subject but a few obvious places to start are
- PHP as an Apache module versus as a CGI script. Most shared hosting accounts run PHP as a CGI script. If speed is a driving factor for your site, look for a hosting account on which you can run PHP as an Apache module.
- MySQL query cache. This is a huge performance gain for MySQL-based apps such as WordPress, Drupal, and many e-commerce engines. If MySQL response time is limiting the page load times for your site, get a hosting account where you can tune the MySQL query cache to meet your site’s specific requirements.
- Local & fast MySQL. Many hosting companies make you use a MySQL database server that is relatively slow to reach and slow to respond. This makes any MySQL-based website run slowly. Consider moving to a hosting account which has the MySQL server on the same box as the rest of your application. (This point does not apply to huge sites which need multiple, physical servers.)
- Sane site design. Pay attention to image sizes, over-use of server-side-includes, bloated code, etc.
Your hosting account makes a big difference in page loading speed. For many (most?) sites, RAM and bandwidth are the bottlenecks, not CPU. It can be hard to get a handle on those specs since many companies only market hosting accounts based on disk size and that does not have any correlation to performance. Talk to your hosting provider and see if a little more money can buy you a significant bump in performance.
Hen’s Teeth Network’s Cirrus Hosting accounts give you the ability to run PHP as an Apache module. All run MySQL locally, giving your site fast access to the database and giving you 100% control over the MySQL query cache configuration. See our earlier article, HTN Cloud Hosting 3x to 4x Faster, for a dramatic illustration of how much the hosting account impacts page load time.
