Is Your Website Loading Slow?

If your web hosting costs you around RM200-300 a year, chances are that it’s a shared basis. Perhaps I’m wrong. Dividing the yearly price to 12 months, I doubt how an average of RM20 monthly web hosting fee is enough to cover the cost of server hardware, bandwidth, co-location and even the unlimited mailbox account offered. That is barely enough for a McD set.

Where goes wrong then?

Forget about the page-long list of feature of those web hosting plan. Look for ‘Monthly data transfer’ and ‘No of website per server’. If you can find them, chances that you are in the right direction. Vaguely still, both offering tricky measurement which sounds to me like finding a virgin in a brothel.

It would be easier to put it this way

1) First offer allows you to stay in a hotel for X amount of days in a month. But didn’t tell you the fact that another 100 people are getting the same offer, and the hotel has just one room! – Monthly data transfer

2) Second offer limits to X amount of people who get the offer, but didn’t mention about the number of days each person will stay in this one-room hotel – No of website per server

What can I do?

Find out number of rooms. In this case, it is the dedicated bandwidth assigned to each website, not server. Remember, shared basis servers host not just your website. It makes huge differences here. A shared 1Mbps for 10 websites may be slower than single website with dedicated 256Kbps bandwidth.

Find out number of days one can stay in your second offer. In this case, check out the ‘Compute Cycles’ offered. It measures how much the processing time your application required in a server. 10,000 compute cycles are roughly equivalent to the monthly capacity of a server with a server with 1.2GHz modern processor. For example, a website with only static pages consumes less compute cycles than a website with shopping cart applications.

Is your website loading slow?

I see big corporate website paying as little as RM20 a month for their online infrastructure including email & web hosting (some with domain as well). I bet this amazing offer answer to the question above.