How do I evaluate the performance of my website

[SuperMan]

How do I evaluate the performance of my website?

My site is on a shared web hosting server and gets approx 9000 unique visitors per month, but I am wary about the performance not being there or pages breaking...

Is it time to upgrade to VPS or Dedicated ??

I am looking for how do I know when I have outgrown shared web hosting ???

[defensity]

Damn! -hit the wrong button and lost my lengthy answer...

Anyhow, think this is in the wrong forum. Saw the word performance and it's in the SEO forum, so i thought this post was about SEO performance.

If your site or you can afford the $50-$100 it costs for a vps then sure go for it.
But 9,000 visits per month is not alot and you can certainly stay where you are.
It's not so much visits, but the resources your site uses that will determine your next move.
If you're mainly a static site, then your resource utilization will be very low.
If you are an image host or have a dynamic site with lots of database queries, then you'll be using more resources.

[LD]

How do I evaluate the performance of my website?

My site is on a shared web hosting server and gets approx 9000 unique visitors per month, but I am wary about the performance not being there or pages breaking...

Is it time to upgrade to VPS or Dedicated ??

I am looking for how do I know when I have outgrown shared web hosting ???

Are you noticing anything specific to make want to consider moving the site at this time? Speak to your hosting tech support. They are usually forthcoming with this sort of information.

[Brillig]

Pages should never break due to a shared server. And the best way to check the performance is just to load the pages in your browser and navigate. You'll be getting the same server performance (ignoring network/hop related issues that are unrelated to your server anyway). If you notice slowness in serving pages, you'll need to find out if that's something inherent to how the page is written or if it's an issue with a server that can't handle the load.

[MrGamm]

It is easy to confuse server performance with client side loading performance or slow internet connections. How fast something loads in the browser is usually different. This is a utility I like for determining how fast something loads in the browser. Which is separate and in addition to server performance. http://www.whichloadsfaster.com/

There are website uptime monitor services which will ping a website for uptime.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=uptime...ient=firefox-a

You can also benchmark your own websites performance and record that information to a database.

This might help monitor the load speed of the page.

<?php

$START = time();

// ALL THE OTHER STUFF IN THE PAGE...

$END = time();


// record this stuff to a database or flat file...

$LENGTH = $END - $START;

    file_put_contents("runtimes.txt",$LENGTH."\n","FILE_APPEND");

?>

You basically know when you have outgrown shared resources when the all the scripts are lightweight, but the server starts to intermittently take more than just a few seconds to load (and it can't pinned on one of your own websites, web pages, maintenance routines, ect...).

I am not a server tech though, so I don't know if there is a general rule or measurement system, but when the websites start to get slow then it is time to upgrade to something with either protected resources, or guaranteed resources.

Protected resources, or guaranteed resources, are not the same as a "dedicated" server. They accomplish the same thing, but one may be overkill compared to the other. And its highly debatable if someone offering unlimited is also offering guaranteed, or protected resources.

[AboutWeb]

Are you noticing anything specific to make want to consider moving the site at this time? Speak to your hosting tech support. They are usually forthcoming with this sort of information.

Hosting support will do anything to make him upgrade, just to sell their services.

@SuperMan, you could watch your error_log and there you can see if you have some errors.

[Clarrie]

Brillig's right - just navigating your site will give you a reasonable idea of how its doing, but also signing up to Google Webmaster Tools will show you performance trends over time. Google Analytics also tracks load speed now as well, and these will help you keep an eye on performance.

If you have any concerns about how fast the site loads there are tools you can use to identify any bottlenecks in your construction, Firefox Page Speed add-in for example.

[MrGamm]

Hosting support will do anything to make him upgrade, just to sell their services.

It depends on the company. Some are prone to extort money from you unexpectly with hidden charges. Others are prone to upsell whenever possible. And some just never discuss it.

It really depends on the host. I once asked one several times about upgrading, I asked tech and billing departments on separate occasions. Tech actually suggested a more expensive package than sales on one occasion, and some people gave me the "nah don't bother"

If the OP is on a really crappy shared host. And lets be honest here, not all host are created equal. 9000 uniques, could be alot more, especially if the statistic came from JS analytics in which case, 30 to 40% of traffic to the website could be non-javascript enabled bots.

If the website is slow, upgrade it. If you get a traffic spike or something or the website just starts to balk, you will kick yourself in the head for not being more prepared. Just my two cents.

[LD]

Hosting support will do anything to make him upgrade, just to sell their services.

@SuperMan, you could watch your error_log and there you can see if you have some errors.

My hosting support do not do "anything to make me upgrade". They answer my questions. If they cannot, I speak to sales management (of which, a lot are ex-tech support) and they give me the answers I need to make the right decisions. Perhaps your hosters are "up sellers". I'd change hosts if that's all I got from them with respect to my technical questions.

[PPIS]

Hi All,

Just a suggestion but if you have a spare domain name knocking around, why not take advantage of a 'Free Trial' with another (possibly more reputable) hosting company? Open an account, upload the site and monitor the results. If they are far better than at present, transfer the old domain to the new company and you're away. If there is no difference then, as others have already said, you may need to revisit your code to speed things up.

9000 unique visitors a month shouldn't present any real problem on a shared hosting platform unless the site is heavy on code or large graphics/media. We run several dynamic sites with 4 or five times the traffic without any problems.

As mentioned by AboutWeb, your error logs are a great place to start 'monitoring' performance and it's often very surprising what you find in there!

Moving to a VPS is not always the answer either. I've tried this before with a couple of hosting companies, thinking it would be the answer to my prayers. It can lead to a lot more admin work and, in my experience, the hosting companies aren't very forthcoming with your allocated processing power (number of concurrent processes). They will tell you what the processing power of the server is but not necessarily your share of that power. You have to be quite specific with that question if you have a heavy duty site!

Cheers,

Duncan