StartLogic: Further Impressions
March 7th, 2008 Posted in Web Site
They got my site fixed at around noon. That was a little more than a 12 hour turn-around. I’m feeling a little better now. It turns out my directory wasn’t created on the server when I created my account. Kinda hard to do anything when you don’t have a directory! It seems like a web host with over 100,000 customers would have account setup down by now.
Okay, so now I’m in business…I hope. The first thing I want to install is WordPress. I had installed WordPress earlier when the site didn’t work from the App Installer. Although it said everything worked it really couldn’t have since it didn’t have any place to put the files. The installer thought it worked since it didn’t give me any errors. So I cleaned up the MySQL database instance that I had created and uploaded the latest version of WordPress. It was about 3MB uncompressed. It took 10 minutes to upload. I’m not too impressed by this. Their Internet connection must be a 28.8 modem. I was using Windows Explorer to drag and drop the files. Maybe going that route was slow. I don’t know. Not going to get hung up on it right now.
So I got WordPress set up. My first impression is…SLOW! SLOW! SLOW! Admin pages take up to 30 grueling seconds to load. The blog view takes as long and it’s default WordPress. One post, all text, so there’s nothing to it. Okay, now I hate life.
So I decide to run some tests. I create a info.php that just call phpinfo() and upload it. Interesting…It runs pretty fast. I run it a few times. I has a pretty good average response time. Maybe its the database running slow. So, I create another script to connect to my WordPress database and select all rows from the options table which is the biggest table with 78 rows. I log timestamps for each step in the query process. More interesting…It runs pretty fast also. It takes less than a second on average. What the hell is going on here! Maybe WordPress sucks. I haven’t used it before but I know its pretty popular. It’s gotta be pretty well optimized I would think.
Hmm…what can I try now? When I was running my phpinfo() I noticed that it was on PHP 4. Aren’t they up to version 5? So I snooped around the control panel and found that I could choose between version 4 and version 5. Okay, let’s give 5 a try. Newer is better right? Oh, now I’m getting somewhere! Changing to PHP 5 gives me a significant improvement. I’ve gone from 30 second page loads to 5 to 10 second page loads. Not great but better.
I remembered seeing an option in WordPress to gzip compress articles if the browser asks for it so I enabled this. It’s hard to tell if this did anything since my main page has so little on it. But it didn’t hurt anything so I’ll leave it on for now.
I’m out of ideas for speeding it up for now. The speed is still unacceptable. I’ll research WordPress configuration and PHP configuration changes later. We’ll see how it does when I have some posts up and start messing with themes.
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I was just surfing around the Internet and got into your page with the same issue. My website runs very slow recently. At first, I thought it was because of WP, so I dropped the database and install a new one. But nothing changed. Then I figured out that it was the Database sever of StartLogic. I called them and they said: they’re fixing + install a new server; everything should be back to normal at the end of this week…Hmm, it would be fine if you owe personal website. But what if it was a commercial one that runs slow and can’t finish the transactions..
For now, i’m still stick with them until my plan expires. I’m sure there’re better hosting services but the price they offered me is very cheap: $3.5/mo for ProLogic plan. -_-!
I agree the price is great. I got out of StartLogic within the 30 day money back period. I thought I might have some trouble getting the refund but they gave my money back promptly after calling them. I didn’t have to wait one hold for 30 minutes waiting to talk to someone in the billing department.
I hope they can fix your problems. Good luck!
wow - i’m having the exact same issues. my other two startlogic websites seem to be running fine but i, like you, just installed wordpress yesterday and i’m finding it to be unbearably slow. hopefully as the previous commenter mentioned, this will be cleared up by the end of the week? if not… i’m switching to another host. i only chose wordpress because i couldn’t point my blogger account to my domain due to the fact that startlogic requires an IP address for routing (blogger doesn’t provide IP for this purpose). now i’m afraid i’m caught in a catch 22. thanks for posting this - i’ll try your tips and then wait it out i guess.
Wordpress is really great blog software. You can do pretty much anything with it. There are tons of themes to customize your look. There are also plugins to do about anything easily.
I hope they can work out your problems. I switched to BlueFur.com and have been extremely happy with it. My site is consistently responsive plus their customer service is great. They have a forum where you can post questions and get quick answers.
Everything on my Startlogic hosted sites that depend on MySQL load at a crawl, especially between 7 to 5. Pixelpost pages take up to a full two minutes to load (really - I timed it), though static pages come up quickly. Their hosting used to be okay but Startlogic has been a nightmare over the last year. My sites are huge and I keep hoping things will improve so I won’t have to move them. But every week or two they do something squirrely that cripples my sites.