Sites desperately slow loading. Support say everything is fine.

[daviesg]

Hi
I've been with Hostgator for a few years without any problems. Never had to use support for an issue but over the weekend, my site became desperately slow - so slow as to be almost unusable.

http://www.hershamhounds.org.uk/in-memory

I've set up PA Server monitor to check the websites and I'm getting response times of over 70000 ms (compared to approx 200 ms when testing http://www.nominet.org.uk).

Support are simply stating that there is nothing wrong but I have asked friends to check the website out and they have exactly the same issue.

Are support able to do anything more to assist?

Thanks

Graham

[EarlyOut]

That page loads for me in 1.78s, pretty consistently (give or take a few ms).

By contrast, the nominet.org.uk site takes something like 16.27s every time.

I'm on the East Coast of the U.S.

[doulos]

Very fast - west coast USA

[slowdive]

Averaging 374ms ping from my slow connection out in the sticks of Africa. Site loaded decently quickly too.
Not much help, but least you know its working for us.

[roosh4]

Hmm this kind of sounds like my problem that I just posted:

http://forums.hostgator.com/having-p...g-t132288.html

Does hitting reload when it's hanging cause it to load instantly?

[twingo]

Gator1292 that i'm currently on, is way slow and overloaded. I had been a customer of hostgator for approx a year and was very happy with the great speeds i was getting, so i eventually moved to a 3year deal, however since then the service has gone downhill.

According to host-tracker a simple wordpress blog can take 6 seconds calculating at Hostgator before it will return data (this is minus the DNS lookup), however data transfer speeds are fine. Pingdom also gives approx the same data.

About a month ago i decided to test the speed of a simple <?php phpinfo(); ?> file and how long it takes hostgator to calculate it, host-tracker says that it waits on average about 2seconds before it starts returning data, this isnt a location based issue either, as both Texas/Florida servers from host-tracker show the same kind of wait.

During this time the server load in my cpanel is always above 16, right now its above 24, ive seen it go as high as 31 and as low as 13.......most of the times however its above 16 and my pages load slow.

I tried chatting to a support person in LiveChat, but he seemed very unhelpful about the situation, at first they rebooted the server, told me it would be fine and everything seems good........server load after the reboot was approx 25.95 and pages taking anywhere from 4-6 seconds to load, so i mentioned i was still unhappy and they told me they were getting an admin to look at it. More than 24 hours later the server load is still terrible and the pages are loading slow according to pingdom/host-tracker.

I was told that the servers were monitored for problems so this would never happen, this is obviously incorrect information from hostgator, as i mentioned the server is overloaded and has been for over a month, i could understand a incorrectly configured blog having a high load time, but a simple "phpinfo();". It's also nothing to do with my account as its a server wide issue, yet hostgator is allowing this to happen to there customers.

If this was the first time this server had performance issues i would probably not be that concerned, but it isn't, and every time my score at the end of the livechat has been less and less and less........until my latest ticket which was a 0 to regards if i would recommend hostgator to anybody.

[Conflagrant]

Twingo,

I have very similar issues with gator81 at the moment. Been with Hostgator for years and I have a number of WP blogs hosted here. Never had a problem until the last few months, but the page load speeds are now pretty bad.

Was interesting you saying that page test tools show the server doing nothing for 6 seconds or so, my time to first byte is about 6 seconds too when the server is acting up. It seems to be an intermittent problem. On bad days I have seen a blog page that normally loads in 2-3 seconds take in excess of 30s.

Support tell me the server is fine, but the web page speed test site I use tells me it definitely isn't fine. My personal experience (in the UK) of page load speeds is that there is definitely a problem but as yet I don't know why.

[thrivenow]

I have been having this issue for the past few months. Even on my new account which I got the dedicated business account. It is actually slower than my shared account! I am about to move all my websites as there seems to be no fix.

I have been with HG for almost 4 years and have never had issues until about 3-4 months ago with their speeds.

After looking at the many having issues, it is clear they have done something different to cause this. Host Gator, if you don't want to lose customers, it is time for you to give us back our speed. It is unacceptable with shared or dedicated to have to refresh or wait a minute or more to save data or load pages that were running fine previously.

I usually recommend all my clients to HG, but now I am looking for an alternative for them and me. I hate to have to move all this stuff, but seems like they are ignoring the issue and I am not going to keep paying for sub-par service that use to be excellent!

[ixape]

The link in the OPs post takes about 16.1 seconds to load for Pingdom.



However to be fair it is 1.5MB in size - And my average connection speed to the SoftLayer DCs is around 200KB - So this could be why it's taking some time for some people. (I'm from UK.)

[avalanch]

it seems to be loading fine now according to gtmetrix. There's about 16 rules that he needs to work on according to the report.

[boon4376]

I have been having this intermittent slow loading problem with my websites. The chat people always say it will be "fixed in 15 minutes" however I have been having this problem for weeks. I am extremely disappointed. I depend on my websites loading fast and am losing patience.

Actually its not just intermittent slow loading, it will be moments when the site is complete unresponsive.. I could wait 5 minutes and it wont load. Then I could hit reload and it would instantly load...

Page content doesnt make a difference, just sometimes its like my sites server is completely unresponsive.

[Ironside]

I have got the same problem, everybody is politely complaining that the forum is running slowly a lot of the time compared to other websites that they use. Regrettably I have to agree, we are very slow, and it's not just my Oscarfishlover website that is slow, many of the other websites hosted with host Gator as slow are well. I'm afraid that the time has come to start looking for a new hosting company

http://www.oscarfishlover.com/forum/...e-running-slow

[EarlyOut]

OFL, your forum comes up very quickly for me. If you're seeing slowness from various HG sites, I suspect the problem has nothing to do with your PC or with HG's servers. My attention would be focused on the nodes between the U.K. and Texas. I think it's a fair bet that there are one or more overloaded or flaky nodes somewhere on that path. What does a tracert show?

If I'm right, switching to another U.S. host isn't going to improve things at all. In fact, most hosts have much weaker networks than HG does, so you're likely to end up with a worse result. If most of your visitors are in the U.K., a U.K. host, on the other hand, might provide you with better response.

[EarlyOut]

BTW, your home page is now coming up in well under 4 seconds, which is better than it was before. Still not great, but considering the number of individual scripts, stylesheets, and image files that page is calling, not too bad.

[Ironside]

I would say the majority of my users are actually in the USA, I am over in the UK. I'm just looking at the inodes in my Cpanel and it seems that the limit is 250,000, however it seems I am using 304,515, will this make a difference to the speed of my websites?

[EarlyOut]

Inode usage shouldn't affect speed, but you may get a nastygram from HG about it. That's a huge, huge number for what I see on your site.

(Most other hosts limit you to far fewer inodes than that - my last host had a cutoff at 50,000.)