By Michelle on

I've got 3 small Drupal sites hosted at A Small Orange. $5 a month is nice, but the sites seem really, really slow. I've never had Drupal hosted anywhere else, though, so I don't have a good comparasin. Anyone using ASO? Is it slow for you? I don't know if it's the host or Drupal or just the fact that I'm a module addict. LOL!

Anyway, I'm considering switching hosting companies if I can find a better one that's not too expensive but I don't want to go through all that just to find out it's just as slow somewhere else.

Thanks,

Michelle

Comments

tjharman’s picture

tjharman commented

I'm not using Orange - I host my own server with a friend (I'm lucky I guess!)

Are you using Drupal 4.6 and the pathauto module? There's a known flaw in 4.6.x Drupal that causes sites with many aliases to slow down, the more aliases you add the slower it gets. If you have a site with a bunch of aliases this might be the problem. There's a a patch available, look at the pathauto module project page for information.

Mostly likely though, you're getting what you're paying for. You host is probably lumping many many users onto the one server and either the PHP execution overhead or the MySQL queries are being slowed down.

Best way to check? Test out some other Drupal sites! I think I have my site running pretty fast, but again it's dedicated.

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

I do use pathauto and I have a pretty good number of paths. It's fixed in 4.7? I'm going to be upgrading the site to 4.7 in the next few weeks so we'll see if it runs faster, then.

It's hard to compare by looking at other Drupal sites because I don't have any way of knowing what sort of hosting they have. Drupal.org runs pretty fast for me, and it's huge, so I suspect it's not Drupal that's the problem but either ASO or the sheer number of modules I tend to cram in there. :)

Thanks,

Michelle

samcohen’s picture

samcohen commented

I use ASO and love the company -- great customer service -- but I've been increasingly frustrated lately with slow servers. I'm still developing a site and it's slow.

Because of this I'm now looking to go dedicated. ASO sells dedicated but they're sold out and won't have new ones for months.

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

I can't afford dedicated, unfortunately. I'm running my personal site and two club sites, none of which pay me a penny. So the $5 is nice but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the speed. I've heard good things about Site5 and may make the jump there if this isn't any better once I'm running 4.7.

Thanks,

Michelle

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

A friend of mine just made the jump from personal hosting to Site5 and is in love with them. He's got one of their multi-domain plans and is hosting 3 domains currently.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

lanesharon’s picture

lanesharon commented

Man, I am glad to hear I am not the only one have speed problems with ASO. I even pathpinged it and found out that the bottle neck is at the Planet, but I was told that it was not them but the network it was travelling through. I didn't believe that explanation because the network is a main networking system.

I keep getting 'stalls' on HTTP, FTP, even mail gathering. A few seconds later, it is fine. Maybe sometimes longer. Just enough to give me 'website not found errors' on my site. Which is really starting to upset me because I know that my users must be getting the same messages.

It is nice to know I am not alone in this, at least. After reading your posts today, I have to seriously consider changing hosts. I know it isn't Drupal because I am running several other website setups on my account.

Just one quick question for those of you on ASO. Are you on Kappa, along with me?

Take Care, Sharon

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

I'm on chi. I've got speed problems even when using cPanel or in the SSH program so, yeah, I know now it's not Drupal. I'll be moving to site5 in the next couple months unless some other hosting company suddenly looks better.

Michelle

lanesharon’s picture

lanesharon commented

Michelle, You may want to go to www.webhostingtalk.com and do a search on site5. There are some unhappy clients there.
Take Care, Sharon

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Unfortunately, there's always someone that's unhappy. But I've talked to people who work with Drupal a lot who are happy with site5, so that's my leading candidate right now. I probably won't be switching for another month or so, so who knows what will happen between now and then.

Thanks,

Michelle

lanesharon’s picture

lanesharon commented

I did a little detective work today and found out that there have been networking problems in an area of thePlanet. That is where Kappa is housed and I suppose other ASO servers. Since I had been getting packet losses on pathpings, I will assume that maybe these network problems are causing them. They said on thePlanet forums that they would let others know when things are cleared up. I'll be watching...
Take Care, Sharon

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

I have been on Site5 for the last six months on a reseller account (which I dont actually resell) and I am satisfied overall till now. There were two occasions when my site was down for about 45 minutes each because of MySQL overload, but other than that, things have been good. The customer to customer forums on Site5 provide wonderful support (apart from the main tech support team) - they have someone called Steven Byrd there who practically lives on the forums all 24 hours.

I have occasional problems accessing email using Thunderbird but that may have more to do with IMAP and the old version (0.9) I am still using.

Overall, very good value for money and you can host multiple sites. They are now using Subversion so you can easily roll back file changes and so on. Very useful.

chameleonwebhosting’s picture

chameleonwebhosting commented

Check the plans that we offer. They're all Drupal friendly, and are fast.

I'll have to get a Drupal site on the go for a demo site lol. The link's in the sig.

Highland Webhosting

[edit -sp: added missing cloing quote]

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

It underlines when I hover but I can't click on it and the cursor doesn't change.

Michelle

Miss Opportunity’s picture

Miss Opportunity commented

We used to use 'a small orange' for our hosting services. Unfortunately we were forced to leave them because there was always something bad happening on/off with their service. Their customer support can be very unprofessional at times, teetering on even being immature with their responses.

We put up with it all until their servers became unbearably slow, so we decided to start looking for a new host. We ended up choosing Site5 and we're happy to report that we couldn't be happier! All of our sites (we have 12 of them) are always lightning fast, and their customer support bends over backwards to help us. They even let us use their services for two months for free when we had a problem with our bank account (someone stole our chargecard and the bank had to temporarily close our account). We didn't think that Site5 would care about the reason we couldn't renew our service with them, but they were very sympathetic and understanding and allowed us to use their service until the bank was finished doing what they had to do, which was around two months later. When was the last time a hosting company bent over backward and did that for you? We've heard rumors that most of the good things that you read about 'a small orange' are actually written by a small orange employees, and that wouldn't surprise us after dealing with them.

On the other hand we have nothing but good things to say about Site5. Like the other person above mentioned, Steven Byrd practically runs their forum and gives excellent customer support above and beyond the call of duty 24/7/365. Their control panel is state of the art and much better than the standard cpanel you usually get from hosts. We worry about a lot of things these days, but our host (Site5) is not one of them. We highly recommend them :)

ergophobe’s picture

ergophobe commented

I have one account at Site5, but can't really say much since I haven't done much with it.

I've run several sites at JaguarPC.com on a couple of accounts. I've also recommended it to someone who normallyhosts on high-end dedicated servers but needed a cheap shared host and a couple of months ago he wrote to me that every time he signs into the control panel he thinks of me and has been happy with Jag. I had problems during the last server upgrades, but overall they're great - will install custom PHP modules for you, give you php.ini access, host unlimited domains on one account. They also kept my account running for free for a month when my credit card was stolen.

As for speed and uptime, I've been quite satisfied in general.

I just wish they would get their affiliate program laucnhed, since I've recommended them to so many people!

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