I’m having pretty heavy (lots of images) WordPress website with around 20-30k unique users per day (1,000,000 monthly).
German hosting that I use works fine in Europe, but many visitors from the USA, Asia and Australia complain about loading times.
Do you know any good, affordable hosting companies that provide fast browsing to people from the USA > Australia > the UK > the rest of Europe > the rest of World (in this order) as most of my visitors are from these places? 🙂
My current site “eats around 600 GB bandwidth monthly.
I was thinking about MediaTemple, but I have mixed feelings, many people say it totally sucks and even more love it.
I’d love the ability to buy additional bandwidth and using a few different WP blogs using one account.
Saw that you and a few others had their doubts about Media Temple. First off, if you have any questions feel free to ask. We have a good amount of customers with different experiences, be it bad or good. The shared service gets a lot more grief than our VPS, which many of our customers are very happy with.
I see many people recommending VPS hosting, and if that’s what you are looking for you may give our new (dv) 4.0 a look. Depending on your price range, we may or may not be the right place for you.
@saltcod
We do indeed have times where are we do fall short in providing consistently fast service. We are constantly working on improving our shared service to run as quickly as possible. At times the slowness is definitely our fault. At other times we find that customers are running sites that are either too big for what they have, or they are inundated with things that are making the site run slow (plugins, themes, etc.)
Finally, not all customers that carry that logo are sponsored, some of those customers are also using our referral program. We make the badges publicly available on our website.
Please feel free to let me know if you have any other questions regarding our services.
I recently switched my site from DreamHost VPS (managed) to Linode VPS (unmanaged) and think it would probably work for your site. Plans with 600GB transfer are $60.00 which is very reasonable, as long as the other specifications fit your needs. You can also choose the geographic location of your server like London, UK, Newark, NJ, Atlanta, GA, Dallas, TX and Fremont, CA.
For the size of your site it’s probably in your best interest to use an unmanaged VPS, as long as you or someone you know is able to administer the server properly. When managing your own VPS, you’ll have a whole array of new issues to consider like security and updates, although Linode will take care of all hardware-related issues for you.
If you have any questions about Linode just post a comment here and I’ll try to answer as best I can. I migrated my site from DH to Linode about a week ago and am running Debian Squeeze + Nginx HTTP server + PHP + MySQL.
Did you thought going to cloud storage/servers? Like Amazon (S3), Rackspace(Cloud files)?
The best thing is that you can pay how much you use, it’s scalable, plus they both offer great CDN so your loading times will be almost the same anywhere in the world.
They also have a calculator and you can see how much it will cost u.
You can give it a try first by uploading some images and see the results.
I think it’s a good choice because i see your problem more as traffic/storage problem.
I can +1 for Linode. I was with them for about a year and it was fast, fast, fast. Shared hosting can’t even compare. Sadly, I was in way over my head technically and eventually switched back to shared hosting for fear of having a problem that I wouldn’t be able to resolve.
In short, if the prospect of setting up a web server in Ubuntu or CentOS doesn’t frighten you, then go ahead.
Also, stay far far away from Media Temple. The people with the Media Temple badges in their footer bars are sponsored and hence taken care of. I’ve tried a lot of different hosts over the years, but Media Temple was just painfully slow.
I suggest using Bluehost shared hosting package, if you don’t want to pay much. The package gives you unlimited storage and bandwith. In my case, my website loads very fast (with the same traffic as yours).
There’s a crucial question that must be answered: are you able to completely manage your own linux server on your own? If you can, then you have plenty of options, and you just have to pick your price point.
But if you’re like me, comfortable developing your wordpress blog, but you don’t fully understand all that’s required to configure, install, and secure a linux server, then nearly all of those options are useless. It’s what keeps many people on low-end shared hosting (Bluehost), where they don’t have to worry about anything on the server – they can just worry about their blog, and everything “under the hood” is taken care of.
If this is the case, then when you need more performance, you need to specifically look for “fully managed” hosting, whether on VPS or dedicated servers. And that’s where your options get much slimmer (or much more expensive).
This issue of “server management” is the not-so-obvious lynchpin when you’re shopping for hosting. Nearly all the services you’ll find will just give you a linux server (virtual or literal), throw some basic control panel on it and say “good luck”. If you don’t know how to re-compile PHP with the proper extensions, you have to open a ticket, wait a long time, and pay through the nose for “advanced tech support”, as most included support only covers failure of the actual server.
I’ve recently moved all of my personal and client hosting to Unixy, for one simple reason: they will do whatever I ask, whenever I ask it. They offer fully managed VPS and dedicated servers, and they really mean it. You can get a GUI control panel, but you don’t even need one. You name it, they’ll do it, no matter what it involves. I have yet to find any request that doesn’t fall within their full-service guarantee. It’s like having my own personal linux sysadmin on call 24/7, for no extra charge.
Typical interaction via email:
ME: Can I please get xdebug extension enabled?
UNIXY: (60 seconds later) This is in progress.
UNIXY: (5 minutes later) This is completed.
I’m completely serious. I’ve never waited longer than 5 minutes to get a response to any email, even at 3AM. And while this is obviously a simple request, I’ve asked them to write custom backup and cloning scripts for me, even help debug custom wordpress development. Literally anything you’d ask if you had your own full-time private linux sysadmin.
I have no affiliation with Unixy (and no paid affiliate link), I’m just a happy client. If you need more performance than shared hosting, but managing your own VPS is too scary, check them out.
http://www.unixy.net
I really like MDD hosting. I had some technical questions on WP MU and domain mapping and they answered them pretty quickly. They’re also running Litespeed web server which some claim is faster than your normal Apache.
Like others, I have mixed feelings about MediaTemple too. I think they’re not as fast they used to be but for some things having a toll free 800 for support is great. They helped me setup some symbolic links just over the weekend on a simple 5 minute call.
From your traffic metrics, I know you need either a dedicated or VPS soluton but I wrote up an extensive review of WP hosting including MT on shared / lower priced hosting plans here: http://wpverse.com/eak