Performance

Create an efficient website. When websites are very slow, it is usually because the pages are inefficient. There are two aspects of this. One is on the server where bloated or inefficient code and database are used to create pages. The other is on the client side where large amounts of content can take a long time and big client side scripts can take a long time to run.

There are many was that disk use affects performance — some of which you will have more control over than others. File fragmentation tends to make disk access slower. Similarly, slow hard drives affect disk access. In general your hosting company will manage this side of things for you.

One aspect of disk performance that all website owners have access to is their own content. Keeping files as small as possible certainly helps. This is most often associated with images and flash elements. However, maintaining efficient databases will also improve performance. With blogging software, databases often get clogged with old article drafts and versions that reduce performance. These should be cleaned up regularly.

In a perfect world, you would want a solid state drive. But remember: the old fashioned types still work quite well. And there are lots of things you can do to improve your disk performance using whatever hardware you happen to be using.

Browser caching is done on the user side and it determines whether to ask for new copies of things that the browser already has stored. For example, the header image on a website that the user visits a lot will be stored in the browser’s cache. Generally, it isn’t necessary to get a new copy of the image each time, because it rarely if ever changes. The same is true of CSS and JavaScript files. Servers can be sped up by not requiring them to send out redundant files. This is done by adding some code to the website’s .htaccess file. Depending upon the nature of the site and its users, the performance gain can be substantial.

Bandwidth is still an important aspect of performance. And if websites were still just HTML files with a couple of embedded images, performance would be primarily just a matter of bandwidth. But almost all websites now use enormous amounts of server side scripting and database accessing. As a result, performance is about much more than just bandwidth.

You don’t. You have two options. One would be to get another shared hosting plan or provider that has more resources or fewer users (a single server can host several hundred websites — even over a thousand). The other alternative is to get a dedicated server where you have pretty much complete control over the system.

The internet is global, but connections aren’t direct. Moving a bit of data from one computer to another generally requires many “hops” from one computer to another until the data bit arrives at its destination. Each hop requires extra time, but not all hops are equal. The closer the user’s computer is to the web server, the fewer the hops and — most important — the shorter the hops.

A content delivery network (also called a content distribution network or CDN) is a distribution of computers all over the world. These allow a particular website to be hosteWhat about a content delivery network?d in different places so that users can be served from hosts that are closer to themselves and thus speed up the process. A number of companies offer these services, specifically Akamai Technologies and Limelight Network.

For many websites, the biggest performance issues don’t come the site itself but from embedded content delivered from other sites. This sometimes becomes an issue when sites that are desperate for advertising revenue clutter their pages with heavy flash content. It is important to judge the costs and benefits of any addition to your website.

If you have access, there are many things that can be done. This is a great advantage of dedicated hosting: it is possible to tailor the server to your specific needs. Apache is modular, so there are many parts of the program that you may not need to load. Similarly, you can turn off DNS lookups, which can really slowdown data serving. The KeepAlive directive puts multiple requests on a single TCP connection. You can even use more exotic things like mod_gzip or other tools to compress data sent to browsers. The page you are reading right now was sent in compressed form.

The performance of IIS can be improved using the same tool set that one would use for an Apache web server. Microsoft and various other sources offer detailed information on doing this.

If you need a great deal of control over your web server, you will need a dedicated server. But just because you have a dedicated server doesn’t mean that you can get whatever you want. Dedicated servers are rented through server companies. They need to be of general enough configuration that they can be rented out to other clients. If you want complete control, you need a colocation service.

A colocation service provides a place to put your hardware. In general, only you deal with the system once it is installed. Thus, you have complete control — but also complete responsibility. The trend in computing is toward distributed solutions. Of course, if you are up for it, you could create your own cloud web server with computers all over the world using OpenStack. But in general, although colocation has many uses, it is rarely the right solution for general website hosting because there are already companies providing services for most anything you would want to do.

Cloud web servers have a number of advantages over dedicated hosting. Perhaps the biggest is the flexibility with which you can add resources. Adding more memory to a dedicated server requires physically putting more RAM into the machine. With a cloud server, it just requires changing the memory allocation of the cloud, which is done electronically and instantly.

The down side of cloud web servers is that they are not necessarily any faster. There are other issues that people worry about like transparency and redundancy that are at least clearer with dedicated solutions. Over time, it is likely that cloud servers will win out. But right now, dedicated servers are probably the way to go unless you have specific reasons to go with a cloud solution. But that may change soon.

Google says it does. But it does not appear to be your overall website speed but rather your time-to-first-byte. Only some parts of a website performance is measured by this: network latency, server side processes, and web server load. Clearly, these are not greatly under the control of those using shared hosting. But they provide more incentives for purchasing dedicated or cloud hosting