AKA Hosting Move Update #1 - Speed
It’s been almost a week since I moved this and all my other hosted sites from
Media Temple to WebFaction. Given
that there isn’t a massive amount of information out there on WebFaction
(although there was enough to convince me to try them, thanks to Technorati!)
I thought I’d do a short post on how things are looking on this side of the
fence.
Host moves can often be a “grass is greener” type of affair. You like the look
of a particular feature that your host doesn’t have, or their pricing seems
better, or they offer a revolutionary scaling grid system that’ll make your
site Digg proof, and you jump ship. I left A Small Orange to move to Media
Temple (I seemed to have landed a slightly temperamental server at ASO, but
friends have had no such problems with them) in order to host a big future
project of mine.
I’m happy to say that, in this case, the grass is altogether greener and far
more luscious than it was over t’other side. The main reason for my move was
Media Temple’s apparent slowness with the sites I was hosting. These are all
low traffic WordPress blogs, so nothing particularly adventurous or taxing,
but when the mind boggling tedium induced by simply clicking on the “write”
link in the WordPress dashboard became too much to bear I had to try something
else.
I set up a WebFaction account for roughly $9.50. I’m in the UK, so I ended up
paying VAT on top of whatever they charged, so a straight conversion won’t
quite give you the total paid. I figured I could write that off if they ended
up being slower than Media Temple and close the account after month 1. Or take
advantage of their 60 day money back promise.
I copied one of my sites across, and loaded up the WordPress dashboard. Then,
in another browser, on another monitor (yes, I have _two _monitors - how posh
am I?), I loaded up the same site on Media Temple’s servers.
Now, admittedly this isn’t strictly speaking a fair test - there are a number
of reasons beyond the host that could account for the difference in speed, but
the WebFaction hosted site seemed so much quicker it was untrue. I was seeing
ten second load times for the write post page, compared to three seconds on
WebFaction. Maybe Media Temple was having a particularly bad night, but tests
on subsequent nights confirmed a definite speed difference.
It’s worth noting at this stage that this was a totally unscientific test, and
was simply a case of me clicking on two links in two different browsers and
seeing which loaded quickest. However, there was enough in it to take things
further.
Using the Pingdom’s Full Page Test tool I compared the speeds of the two
sites. Despite the fact that an image from the WebFaction site was hosted on
Media Temple, the former loaded almost twice as fast as the latter. I don’t
have the figures to hand, but it was something like 3.2 seconds for
WebFaction, and 5.9 for MediaTemple.
The next step was to move an actual “production” blog across, and see what
happened. I migrated Andy’s Colonel
Irrelevant and he agreed that the speed
was significantly quicker. At this point I decided I’d go for it, and moved
the lot. It was cheaper, it certainly _seemed _quicker, and all my tests so
far - without getting too anal about the whole thing - seemed to support that.
Having moved everything, I can tell you that Is There Food is quicker, both
inside the bowels of WordPress and loading the page itself. Ian’s Mine Was
Taller has also moved, and he’s confirmed that
the speed of the site has increased.
All my other sites have benefited from the move too. I’m still waiting for
Gary and Nicola to sort themselves out…but that’s another story.
Even WebFaction’s installation of PHPMyAdmin is faster to load and more
responsive to use.
Final word: I’m glad I moved. I’ve not closed my account with Media Temple yet
because of Gary’s and Nicola’s sites. Annoyingly, I’ve just automatically paid
for another month’s hosting, otherwise I’d have pulled the plug on them ;)
WebFaction beats Media Temple in every way but one. At least, from my side of
the Atlantic. A future post will discuss WebFaction’s control panel which is a
little unconventional if you’re used to CPanel, or indeed Media Temple’s own
flavour of admin console. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more powerful,
and actually easier to use, but more later.
What’s the one thing Media Temple has over WebFaction? Their Web 2.0 smugness
and sheen. There’s no fancy front page, no “picked last in gym class?”, no
cuddly looking icons in the control panel, and no promise of amazing new Digg-
proof technology at WebFaction.
It’s possible that Media Temple’s Grid Service is as broken as many Google
search results seem to suggest. Their upcoming Cluster Server might fix
things, and if they learn from their mistakes there’s no reason it won’t be
awesome, so I’ll keep an eye on that.
But when things are working as well as they appear to be at the moment, I’ll
take workmanlike over trendy any day of the week.