Performance is one of the key indicators that website owners are watching and want to improve. A faster website means happy visitors, more online orders, and better ranking in search engine results.

Starting today we are offering a new feature to check the global load on the server that is hosting your website.

The main factors affecting a website’s performance are:

  • Website code. The features that are implemented in a website and the way the source code is optimized significantly influence the loading speed of a web page. For instance, the more WordPress plugins you have installed (and possibly not optimized for performance), the slower the website will load.
  • Website size. A large database and large files (e.g. images) used when showing a web page will slow down the website.
  • Website traffic. As the number of visitors who are simultaneously browsing the website is increasing, you may reach the hosting account limits, affecting the performance.
  • The web hosting service. A hosting account has certain computing power allocated (RAM and CPU) which may not be enough for your website. In your cPanel account, on the Resource Usage page, you can check if the account limits have been reached. Another possible problem is an overloaded hosting server. This happens when too many hosting accounts are deployed on the server, or some accounts are consuming a high amount of computing resources for the hardware characteristics of the server. A responsible web hosting provider makes sure that the server is not overloaded. Now you can check the Server load of a server from your Hosterion cPanel account.

How to increase the performance of your website?

You have two options, and you can even implement both:

  1. Optimize the code. Your web development team can optimize your website code for performance. This will allow your website to sustain more traffic without upgrading the hosting package.
  2. Choose a more powerful hosting service. You can upgrade from a regular web hosting account to an optimized WordPress hosting service that includes more computing resources, to a VPS, or to a dedicated server.

Talk to your development team and to your hosting provider to decide the best course of action. Sometimes, simply activating and configuring website caching can work miracles. But this does not always work. It depends on the way the code was written.

If cache cannot fix the problem, perform a cost-benefit analysis and choose between (a) code optimization by the web development team and (b) upgrading the web hosting service. In some cases, even if you choose to pay more for hosting it’s still cheaper than paying for software development. But upgrading the hosting package is not a universal remedy. Depending on the technical operations that the website code performance, how unoptimized the code is, and your website traffic, even a powerful cutting-edge dedicated server may be unable to sustain the load.

You can now check the global server load

We, at Hosterion, are continuously monitoring the load level on our servers and take steps when the load is close to the limits. Our goal is to keep servers load at healthy limits and to be open about it with our customers. Effective as of today, you have access to server-level information regarding CPU load and RAM usage. You can now distinguish between an overloaded server and a hosting package with insufficient resources for your consumption level.

In your cPanel account (usually at yourdomain.com/cpanel), in section Metrics, you can find the new Server load link.

You will see the load on the CPU and the percentage of used memory. This is global server information, not just your hosting account.

The new Server load option is available for the following Hosterion services: