Sluggish Site / Internal Server Errors

The problem is not WP; it’s GoDaddy. They have a bad rap as a webhost. (Search these forums for details.) See Recommended WordPress Web Hosting

Here’s a quick 2-step exercise you can try, for my site, https://picturesfor.me it took my loading times from averaging ~15 seconds, to ~2-3.

1. Create an account with Amazon Web Services, setting up an S3 bucket, followed by cloud front. (This is FREE, and will remain so until you’re pushing far and away enough traffic to afford it)

2. Install a caching plugin, I use W3 Total Cache on all my websites, and it works wonderfully.

https://tools.pingdom.com is a great resource for monitoring the effect of your caching, and the performance increase over time.

Hope this helps!

@chrisipeters: your “answer” has absolutely nothing to do with ellicksonphoto’s question. Are you just flogging your own site link for SEO?

@songdogtech: maybe I read his post incorrectly, but from the title, and what I got from it he was asking about sluggish performance, and frequent 500 internal server errors.

Anyone running WordPress on low-price shared hosts (aka godaddy) knows and lives through the fun that is slow server performance. implementing caching and a CDN is a FREE solution that will most definitely address his concerns here…

what part of that DOESN’T have everything to do with what he posted about?

Appreciate the help here guys, no need to get your dander up on my account. Although I’ve had a web site for many years now I’m attempting to take control of my own destiny with this. The person who built my current site set up the hosting on Goddady and that’s just where I’ve been ever since. I’ve never until now had any problems and would prefer to stay there for now if for no other reason than I don’t want the hassle of transferring the site. Godaddy themselves recommended W3 Total Cache so I’ll look into that. If that doesn’t work then maybe I’ll have to look into a switch.

Chris

hehe, it’s all cool. I too am using a shared hosting provider, which is why I sympathize with your pain. Since the majority of my traffic is serving static images, rather than heavy application load, a CDN is definitely the way to go to increase performance as opposed to moving up to a pricey VPS solution.

Using W3 Total Cache in conjunction with Amazon’s Cloudfront achieves 2 goals with speed:
– your static content (images etc) are now served to visitors from Amazon’s distributed servers (makes up for small pipes to your Hosting Provider)

– you are able to minify and cache your site including DB (which makes up for your host’s MySQL performance).

1 quick tip on W3 Total Cache. I have all caching options enabled, except javascript. On all the sites I’ve used it, with it on the site breaks, with it off, everything runs great.

Any time your site takes over 5 seconds to load, you will see a massive effect on visitors, which is why in my own experience, setting up a free solution that took my load times from in excess of 15 seconds to under 3 on a shared host was something that excited me enough to post about.

chrisipeters, are you saying I’m better off hosting images somewhere other than my own site? I don’t understand how it would run faster if so but I’m slowly figuring this all out, definitely has been a learning experience. Currently I’ve set up Slideshow Pro Director on my site to embed slideshows in my posts, looks pretty impressive plus images can’t be downloaded as they otherwise would be. There’s even a Lightroom plugin that will upload images directly to my site. Thought at first this may be the problem but the whole site is slow, even navigation on the backend.

using a Content Delivery Network on your website is rather like using regional warehousing for your company. Rather than having to manufacture your product, process orders, and dispatch delivery trucks all from one central location, you manufacture your product, process orders, then send the processed orders to your regional warehouses for final delivery.

As far as you are concerned, images and CDN content are all still coming from your website, just not ultimately your own server. the W3 Total cache plugin handles this all seamlessly for you, you use wordpress just like you always have, but when a visitor hits your site from the East Coast (or further away) rather than having to pull all the static data from your server on the West Coast, it comes down from one of Amazon’s regional servers.

At risk of another shameless plug, if you head to my site https://picturesfor.me, right-click and view source for one of my images, you’ll not get an address at my domain, but rather one like:
d1lf1ubfnyr7ii.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/picturesForMe_logo5.png

that image that I myself uploaded to my WordPress install is ultimately being sent to you from Cloudfront. Again, I didn’t have to do anything differently on my side, the W3 Total Cache Plugin takes care of all the synching with the CDN auto-magically.

Thanks, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I’ll have to consider how this will affect my Slideshow Pro installation. Signing out for now but will check back in the morning. As far as shameless plugs go here’s my current site: https://www.ellicksonphoto.com which is using Photofolio, here it it is in it’s nearly completed form https://www.ellicksonphoto.com/wordpress
If you go to the blog page there are two sample posts, one of with contains a sample slide show.