Bluehost Pro Hosting Performance – Woocommerce

Hi all,

I’m tearing my hair out and hoping I can get some accurate and constructive feedback from this community.

Firstly, I must mention I am not a web developer and my understanding of how websites work is limited so please forgive my ignorance. I’m one of the countless people who fall for the marketing of hosting providers and dive in expecting things to go smoothly which, of course, they don’t.

I have built a small e-commerce site for a friend of mine who had to take her bakery business online due to covid. She used Shopify previously and was suffering from a lack of functionality so I volunteered to set up a site as I knew WordPress and Woocommerce could solve the problems she was encountering.

I use Bluehost shared Pro hosting and run WordPress with Woocommerce and the Storefront theme. I have 33 plugins and I need them all to be able to present the site as my friend wants. I don’t run any caching plugins as it’s only a 5 page site and the majority of the load is on the woocommerce pages like shop, basket and my account which you don’t want to cache. There are only 22 products in total and usually only 17 have stock at any 1 time. I use Cloudflare as the cdn provider which I activated last week following a confusing mess with Bluehost as their c-panel activation feature wasn’t working (and as it turns out would have caused a further headache) so set it up successfully direct with Cloudflare.

I have spent an age on this site getting it looking good and researching plugins etc to get it how it needs to be, about 2 months in total. Just over a week ago we went live for the 1st time which involves activating WP Maintenance mode, filling the stock, de-activating maintenance and then launching at 18:00hrs BST on a Sunday. The shop is only open for 24 hours so the customer base all try to log on concurrently – typically 40-50 users at once and then tails off over 24 hours. There are 22 products in total and only 17 have stock at any one time so it’s a small site.

First week the website crashes. Internal server errors plague the user experience. I lose access too of course so am powerless to do anything but moan to Bluehost support. They tell me it’s because I don’t have Cloudflare enabled and there are no server issues. I explained to them I couldn’t enable it due to their c-panel issue but took it on the chin and set it up last week confident it would be the solution. The website creaked and groaned but as user numbers tailed off people successfully placed orders and after 24 hours it seemed to get the job done.

Yesterday we launched again with Cloudflare and exactly the same thing happened although the server issues lasted a lot longer, up to an hour and a half. My friend is really upset, her customers are all annoyed. Eventually the orders trickle through but the user experience is horrible and I’m costing my friend credibility and mine has all but evaporated. Who wants to use a rubbish website? Nobody.

I spent about an hour on to Bluehost support and they suggested 2 things. Firstly to create multiple new mysql users and assign them to the correct database as Bluehost have a limit of 15 mysql sessions per user. Secondly activate my dedicated IP that you get with Pro hosting. I originally started out with a starter pack from Bluehost and upgraded to Pro. At no point did they mention to me that the dedicated IP would need to be manually activated. I just assumed it would be done during the migration period. Why would I think anything else? Perhaps my naivety?

Anyway, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I am not a developer and I am not comfortable messing around with creating mysql users as I know I’ll break something. In my basic understanding, I am absolutely amazed that with 40-50 users trying to use the site at once, it falls over and I can’t imagine that only 15 users can access the database at any 1 time otherwise woocommerce would be the least scalable e-commerce plugin going. My friend didn’t have this issue with Shopify!

Also, the dedicated IP suggestion….Bluehost claims this will double the mysql sessions to 30, will speed up my site and solve 90% of my problems. I’ve spent most of the night searching the internet for some truth behind this and all I can find is that having a dedicated IP allows you to navigate to the site by typing in your dedicated IP, allows you to easily FTP to your site and allows you to have a SSL certificate (which you can have on a shared IP anyway).

So are Bluehost right? Or are they just hiding the fact that their shared hosting is inadequate for what I would gauge as pretty low user traffic? How can I prove it?

I have run as many checks on my site as I can. I’ve installed query monitor this morning and there are 190 queries on my shop page but the majority of these are woocommerce itself and when traffic is light I get a load of about 2 seconds which is fine. I run a site health plugin which says there are no issues. Up to date on all plugins, Php, wordpress….all of it.

I’m at a loss. I’d really appreciate your thoughts and input.

Mark

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]