This website is hosted by an American company called Hostgator. It is based in Houston and Austin, Texas.
On occasions the site loads far too slowly for me and I am sure that some visitors have the same feelings. I apologize sincerely because I don’t like to deliver a less than good experience. Something, I don’t know what, changed at Hostgator that made things worse.
As a result, I decided to upgrade the way the site was hosted. This is quite a complicated business. The site will he held on an individual computer (server) at Hostgator rather than sharing a computer. This means transferring all the settings, content and comments.
The new computer is set up and ready to receive the content and comments which will be transferred over the next 72 hours or so. I don’t know when, exactly.
This means that the very last comments made after transfer may not show once the transfer is completed. They might be lost. Visitors should be aware of that. However, I will personally add content because I won’t mind if a few of my comments and an article or two of mine are lost. I can always add them back
After transfer I am hopeful that:
- the site will load faster
- there will be no variations in page load times dependent on busy and quiet times. At the moment things slow down when there is more traffic. This variability should stop after the transfer.
I will keep people posted. This slightly difficult time will be over fairly soon and we can then get back to normal.
Thanks a lot for your patience. If you have any questions please ask in a comment.
I’ve been on a private server for years. When I used a shared server, other clients suffered degredation of service whenever I got a lot of visitors. I’ve kept load times faster by sticking to hand-coded html.
Hi Sarah. Happy New Year. Hope your contract is going well. I agree with what you say. I was reluctant to move to a dedicated server because of cost and the worry about doing it. Simple html does load faster. Moving the site to Hostgator required a lot of searching for problems and a database style site helping me find these problems. That said I prefer simple code. Damn it, I understand html but I don’t understand php and javascript 😉 Help! I have received some freelance help on javascript blocking.
You know what I would really like: my own server in my home but it seems to be too difficult.