In the past couple of weeks, my WordPress 2.5.1 blog has seemed to slow. Loading the blog pages and the administrative pages would sometimes take 30-50 seconds and even timeout.
I have a cheap Linux shared hosting account at Godaddy.com and I wrote to their support several times. They asked me for trace routes. There were many timeouts between the Godaddy servers, ip-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.ip.secureserver.net. Godaddy support suggested that it was a problem with my ISP, then said the timeouts were from hitting their firewalls.
Godaddy support responses were, “Currently your hosting account is working properly and with in all perimeters” (sic). They also suggested, “However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. If you wish to have further resources devoted to your individual site including access to logs and specific services, you may wish to investigate the purchase of our Virtual or Dedicated Servers.”
The site YouGetSignal.com has a reverse IP check enabling you to… “Find other sites hosted on a web server by entering a domain or IP address…” According to YouGetSignal.com, my site has over 1171 domains hosted on the same web server (as lesliewong.us – 64.202.163.77). I guess that’s what $3.65/month hosting gets. But a random check of the listed web sites showed that they loaded very quickly, even WordPress blogs.
I run a LAMP development server on my Macintosh Powerbook G4 on my local network and disregarding the fact that it is one hop away from any client on the network, it loads the blog very quickly.
I tried several things to try speeding up WordPress. Several times a day, I would optimize the MySQL database, though it is less than 2MB. Most of the overhead was due to comment spam (I use Spam Karma 2). I was already using the WP-Cache plug-in. I also tried disabling all plug-ins, downgrading to to WordPress 2.3.3 and using the default WordPress theme. I disabled Google Adsense and the web cam in my sidebar. None seemed to offer much improvement.
I searched for tips on optimizing the speed of WordPress and found Jeff Atwood‘s post on Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs. I was already using a caching plug-in but there was a response from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and his recommended MySQL configuration optimizations. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can edit the my.cnf preference file on my shared host.
I found this site, WebsiteOptimization.com and running the analyzer on my blog home page made me hope that people on dial-up aren’t reading my blog.
Today I created a new MySQL 5.0 database, imported the MySQL 4.0 database that was my blog and now it’s running on that. It seems a little better, but it’s Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM PST, so who’s on the internets then?
@1Earth I’ve been checking the time it takes to load a page on this site and lately, it’s been OK. I even turned off WordPress Super Cache and pages still load at the same speed – at least at my location in California. You can use the site loads.in to check how fast your site loads from over 50 locations worldwide.
After reading this article I was shocked by the new comments – obviously people are looking for a solution to GoDaddy which is STILL slow.
Long story short – my client’s WordPress site is on GoDaddy – painfully slow. Did all the tricks I was offered, front end is barely acceptable, but back-end sometimes doesn’t even load. So I split off a part of the site and hosted it under a new domain on my own HostGator account which I’ve had for almost 10 years.
On HostGator it feels like I’m working on my localhost. When I work on the 2 sites side-by-side I can complete several tasks in my admin on HostGator before the admin on GoDaddy even loads.
When I ping the site on GoDaddy the replies are just slightly slower than site on HostGator – so the big bottle neck must be their MySQL servers – but even 3 years after this article was written, it doesn’t seem like GoDaddy care to do anything about it.
My clients didn’t want to move, and just renewed their account for another 2 years – hence me looking for a solution. But it appears they’re stuffed.
I too went through the godaddy wordpress hell…. consistent 10-30 second download times, routine 10 minute tech calls, and a painfully slow admin page! Finally, I switched and they are a pain to switch from but it is soooooo worth it! Go for it, you won’t be let down. I went with webhostinghub and it’s been great!
hi leslie
after 3 years…
…this is a common problem with godaddy i think, found tons of this issue on google, the only thing to do is switch to another company, i have open 10 tickets on godaddy support and at the moment my problem is not solved…
tnx for the infos.
I have mySql ver 5 and unbearably slow page load on new install apparently during peak times (this morning OK, now this evening slow again).
Will look for new host.
Thank you Leslie, that tip solve my problem on my 3 websites.
@J, I’m pretty sure it was DB that was slow, e.g, my homepage, lesliewong.us loaded quickly because there wasn’t any back end overhead.
Also, I’ve been using the WP Super Cache plug-in and that seems to help. I can’t really complain too much, because I’m only paying ~$2.95/mo for hosting.
Thanks for your recommendation.
I too have experienced problems with my wordpress blog for way too long. I’ve always had good results with godaddy, so the last thing I suspected was the hosting environment. So like many others, I went through the list – deleted plugins, deleted javascripts, made sure I was on PHP 5 which I was, still painfully slow on and off.
Not willing to waste more time on the phone with GoDaddy, I decided to switch over to Bluehost and I’ve got a site that’s running as fast as it should, FINALLY!! So the answer is YES, change your hosting – make sure you export your WP file first and might as well make a copy of your directory too so you don’t lose any images! Other than that, with Bluehost it was really easy.
i guess Godaddy will never be fixed. Its a year later and they have the same issue. I guess if you want to run wordpress, Id advise against godaddy.
the same issue is with me as jai singh have.
should we change the hosting
Godaddy server is to slow with the wordpress, I have website which is hosted on godaddy and the performance of website regarding the speed is not good i write to the godaddy and not get good response, they suggest me to optimize the wordpress coding, It is really funny to here that.
Enjoyed your thoughts on this issue – I thought I’d way in. I was experiencing the exact same things…. I’ve tried everything to fix it – and you know what did it?
Switching hosting providers.
After working hard to get GoDaddy’s customer service to help (to no avail) I just gave up on them.
GoDaddy has terrible shared server environments – and is awful for hosting wordpress. I highly recommend switching over to a better hosting system – I’m using Mosso, and my blog (same blog that godaddy blamed as the problem) now loads in no time flat.
Way faster than the 30 seconds it was taking on GoDaddy!
Leslie,
Thank you so much for the tip about upgrading from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5, it made my gallery2 installation exponentially faster! I was ready to completely give up.
Same with me, installed, was fast, got slow, running on version 5 and still slow… come on guys… a 2 mb db… even if it was doing table scans on every query.. there is now way to explain 50 seconds.. If problem not resolved… godaddy will lose the WP crowd fast…thanks
I just wanted to say thanks for writing the tip about upgrading to MySQL 5.
I was running on MySQL 4 and it was painfully slow, just as you described.
Upgraded to 5 and it is much faster.
It appears that creating a new database solved the problem. Maybe because it’s running on a different server?