How To Handle Shared Hosting Process Lags

If you’re on a shared hosting plan, you share space on a server with other users. The technology used to process shared hosting sometimes needs to be retired and upgraded. When this happens, your site may share space with different users than those on the previous server, and some users on the new shared space may require more processing than you do. Since the space is shared, this can cause process delays for other users.

Back in July, my site was migrated to a new server due to a technology upgrade. When this happened, I noticed the Publish button on WordPress posts went from taking the normal 5-7 seconds to complete to needing 80-300 seconds to complete. While articles got published immediately, this process lag is an inefficiency we’d like to avoid.

We worked with our host and once we identified the source of the problem, our rep manually terminated processes used by other websites on the shared server. This cleared the issue and brought the Publish button back down to the normal 5-7 process time.

As mentioned earlier, process lags occur when other users require more process load. This is specific to the shared hosting environment. To manage the issue, here are your options:

1. Request a manual termination of processes once a month
2. Request to have your website moved to the shared server that’s closest to you
3. Request to have your website moved to a VPS

Option 2 is better fit to optimize both opportunity and monetary costs. However, if you run a big website that requires over 50GB of data, you will have outgrown the shared server environment. At which point, upgrade to a VPS, and upgrade the tier as needed. Each webhost is different and as such offers different VPS tiers. The following is a rundown of the VPS tiers offered by Dreamhost.¹

VPS Tier Options

If you’re curious how much data you use, just ask your webhost. To give you an idea of need, I’ve been producing content on one of my websites since 2010, published over 1100 articles, and have created several subdomains, all of which collect lots of regular activity. The total amount of data all my sites use at the time of this writing is 29GB. I’m not really even close to needing to consider a VPS, but over time that upgrade may be necessary. I’m saying this so you don’t feel like you need a VPS just because you read this article. If you’re new to the blogging space, you aren’t likely to need one.

References:

1. Virtual Private Servers. www.dreamhost.com ↩︎