I’ve been hosting my sites and the sites for my day job at CartikaHosting, and I really LOVE them. CartikaHosting is outstanding – no overselling, technically competent, KILLER support and good product offerings. And really, they are just great people to work with at any hour of the day or night.

So why am I doing a web hosting shootout?

I changed my theme last month and took a huge performance hit. Pingdom monitoring tells me that response time on my homepage has increased from around 465ms in October to 1900ms in December. Ouch!!

Generally, the Pingdom page download tool shows my homepage download completing in about 2.2 seconds. Sometimes that initial homepage get is VERY quick, and I’m happily thinking that I’m faster than some of the major players (ok, I have no ads so that helps, but still, my site can be fast!). Other times the initial get on my homepage can take 2.7 seconds or longer, and that drives me crazy.

I’m going to change my theme because it does far too much database processing from within the pages (I had no idea when I purchased it – live and learn), but for now it makes a great test case. And besides, I need to host a few client sites and I want to be sure I’m using the right services.

I’ve chosen these three hosting companies after a lot of research. I love CartikaHosting. When I search for a fast WordPress host the pros at WHT overwhelmingly recommend MediaLayer (and Cartika) for great, fast overall hosting. And Media Temple has been a seductive option to me for many years – and they host some of the biggest WordPress sites online.

For the shootout, I’ll continue to run this theme and content on my site, and I’ll load it onto my test sites on MediaLayer and Media Temple as well.

I’ll use an AppLayer LX account at MediaLayer and a Grid account at Media Temple. At CartikaHosting I’m using a standard clustered hosting platform.

I want to run the competition for 2 weeks – if there’s something I can decide after 1 week great, and if I don’t have enough data I’ll go 4 weeks.

The qualitative measurements will include Pingdom response time and uptime metrics, Pingdom page download times, Loadimpact page download and loadtesting times, and maybe some other automated tools.

Included will be an evaluation of the following:

• presales
• account signup and registration
• installing and configuring WordPress
• importing content into WordPress
• ftp access
• CHMOD
• user management
• DNS management
• compatibility with the W3 Total Cache plugin and my Amazon S3/Cloudfront CDN
• general impressions and more.

And BONUS! I’ll get to upgrade all three sites to WordPress 2.9 during this shootout! Talk about great timing!

And yeah, I just might get airheaded and need some support, oh, about 3-5 times for each hosting provider. Let’s see how far my $20 goes with these guys.

At the end I’ll make a decision and either move my hosting or keep it here at Cartika.

The shooutout begins tonight! I’ve already signed up for accounts at MediaLayer and Media Temple and will do the setup and content import tonight.

Check back each day – including Christmas! – for my daily updates.

Let it rip!

charlie

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