Last week I signed up for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) at WiredTree. They have been nothing short of amazing in terms of service, support and overall friendliness—I would very highly recommend them. I knew nothing about setting up or running a server when I signed up, so hopefully I’ll have a post in the near future about that experience.

Anyway, I was on a shared server (at a host that shall remain nameless) and ever since I had rebuilt my site in Expression Engine, which uses PHP and MySQL databases, I had noticed incredibly long page loads. I went through all possible optimization steps for EE and didn’t see any appreciable improvement, so I began to suspect that it was the server. I signed up for a monitoring service right before switching hosts, and this graph proves my suspicions:

As you can see, before the switch the average load time was about 4 seconds, with spikes all the way up to 16 seconds. Since moving, the average load time is about 0.3 seconds. That translates very clearly into happier visitors.