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I've got this Drupal site (ligadelconsorcista.org) that I have to move it from one server to another. The reason was that my older host even when it was pretty decent, it started a couple of months now to have many short downtime's, which drove me crazy. The thing is that I've made a sort of mirror copy of the site: I've copied all the files exactly the same, and after that I've imported the database.

The problem is that the new site connects much slower than my old hosting! (the new one is Mediatemple) I've contacted their support and they tell me that there are several factors that can contribute to that... but that has nothing to do with their hosting service.

The thing is that I don´t even know where to start looking for the problem.

Notes: The new configuration is the same that the one I had with the older hosting account. Today I've set an account with Cloudflare's CDN to try to solve the problem. Even if the CDN is configured OK (I've asked their help desk) it won´t add any performance improvement.

Any clues of what may I do about this? Thanks!!

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    I realise this is just coincidence, but we used to host with mediatemple where I used to work and I too found the connection delay to be incredibly sluggish. However, I put this down to the fact that MT was in the US and we were in the UK.
    – MrWhite
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 11:28
  • There is no much traffic in your site and i find it responsive from India. I suggest you to host in your country servers. All providers give 1 month free plan. So for your site shared hosting with good provider will do.
    – AgA
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 16:59

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Okay there are a few ways to skin this so to speak. First get the IP of your new server. Run a ping using a tool like Just Ping. There you can see your global ping times. This will give you an idea on how long it takes to connect to your server from large cities around the world. Ten for more information you'll want to use something like Pingdom Tools to get a waterfall view of exactly what is taking so long to load. Use your larges page there using your domain name not IP. This will give you a pretty good idea of where your bottleneck is. If the site is the same as the other, you may want to consider looking at your .htaccess file and making sure you copied over the settings. A good way to see if the problem is related to your host (Media Temple) is to ask them for another site on your server to test the load time, and run that through pingdom tools.

If the problem is you host you may want to consider switching to a different hosting company. If the problem is not the hosting, and lets say that you are getting bad ping times because you are far away from your host, there are a few approaches. A good practice is to parralelize downloads across hostnames. I would definitely also recommend using a CDN such as CloudFlare, which is easily accomplished buy using web hosting from a cloudflare certified partner or using it directly from CloudFlare, in which case you may will have to update your nameservers. As long as your host is providing a fast connection and the load on the dedicated box is low, then the main problem is that you are to far away from the host. One thing that can help with this whether or not you decide to use a CDN (which I recommend for global load time reduction), is to parrallelize downloads across hostnames. This is due to the fact that most browsers will only make 2 simultaneous connections to a given hostname. This means that if 50 resources are loaded on a page that the browser will do 25 pulls. If the connection takes 200ms, times that by 25= 5 seconds plus the time to download the resources.

Now if you load the resources from multiple hostnames i.e.

c1.example.com c2.example.com c3.example.com c4.emample.com c5.example.com

Then you are only loading 10 resources from each hostname and the browser only has to do 5 pulls = 1 second plus download time.

A CDN will of course reduce the time that it takes to do those pulls.

You can use CNAME entries pointed at the root domain to create these hostnames without maintaining multiple copies of the resources.

I hope that gives you a step in the right direction to getting your global page load times under one second.

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    +1, very nice answer. Only one thing: the amount of parallel requests depends on the browser. IE (up to a certain version that now I cant remember) will do 2, and if I am remembering well Chrome and Firefox 6-8 or so.
    – milo5b
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 12:00
  • Thanks for your answer. In fact I´ve though about a CDN, and I´m using now cloudflare´s. The thing is that it didn´t improved as much as I though it would. I´m doing those ping testings now to try and find the issue. THANKS!!
    – Rosamunda
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 13:19
  • It takes about 24 hours for your resources to get cached, then you'll really notice the difference. Glad I could help.
    – Bryan Apperson
    Commented Dec 14, 2012 at 1:29

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