Table of Contents
Slow Website
The relevance of a website to a company or a brand is continuously increasing. More and more information, more content, and more applications are available there, ensuring the environment’s good performance is crucial. The image, or even the business itself, does not deteriorate due to a malfunction.
There are several reasons why a website is slow and offers a bad user experience, which impacts issues such as SEO. Hosting of that website is one of the most crucial factors. We are going to summarize here ten factors that should be taken into account when choosing the hosting of a web environment and that directly influence its performance:
Heavy user sessions:
Each user who accesses the website or web application requires a memory capacity for the server to process their requests and deliver the content. If this need for resources is very high, the service’s slowness will become noticeable exponentially each time more users access it. In this case, you should review and optimize the code to make each session lighter or increase the available resources correctly (see next point).
Oversized server:
uncontrollably increasing the resources assigned to the same server can cause performance not to improve since there is a turning point when they rise too much. At that point, you should consider horizontal growth, which allows you to distribute the load among several servers, optimizing and facilitating the platform’s growth.
Insufficient disk speed:
The volume of published data, the size of the files, or the number of times we access the database on disk can be reasons that slow down the web service if the IOPS capacity is not correctly dimensioned (total number of I / O operations) of disks according to the needs of the environment
Role division:
Another measure that can improve the application’s performance is distributing each service (web, databases, etc.) on a separate server. This configuration allows you to optimize each server for your real needs and distribute the load to offer a more efficient response to user requests.
Shared platforms:
It is one of the most critical points since hosting our web business on a shared resources platform implies that your server’s performance depends on other clients’ computing demands. If your hosting provider has applied a very high overcommit or has not dimensioned the platform well, you should consider moving to a dedicated environment since, probably, your server does not have the resources you have contracted
Slowness of the network:
If your hosting provider does not have an Internet link with enough bandwidth to respond to all its customers, you may suffer slow service and affect the user experience. Although no provider with their professional data center equipment should have flow problems in the outgoing network, it is a factor that can occur.
Lack of monitoring and alerts:
More than a problem, not having these services can lengthen the response to situations in which it is impossible to detect the origin of your website’s poor performance quickly. We must also consider additional services that the provider can offer us to monitor specific parameters that are not analyzed a priori. Many times mark the cause of the slowness.
Slow interconnections:
Although we have explained methods to optimize the platform that hosts a web application, they are of little use if the environment is not ready with connections between high-speed and high-capacity servers that avoid bottlenecks and delay in each transition.
Combine services:
When a web platform grows and the response speed is critical, specific services can be added or combined to optimize the site at an advanced level. Some examples are, using the cache service for the more massive content, using the Nginx service with Apache to give a faster response to the requests, or the combination of MongoDB and MySQL as access to the database according to the query to be solved.
Inappropriate provider:
Last but not least, your site’s performance can also be due to the ability and experience of your provider to design your hosting solution. Also to its speed in adapting and responding to the needs that arise.
All these points are factors that can answer why a web page is slow. It is advisable to have specialized professionals know when and how to act. If it makes sense to incorporate web acceleration services such as a Network: content Distribution System (CDN) or a caching system.
