Improving Your Hosting’s Speed & Reliability In 2024

How Can I Improve My Site Speed on Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is often very limiting. You’re restricted on server resources and often you’re stuck with extra restrictions placed on you by the hosting provider.

In order to improve your website’s speed on shared hosting, you’ll want to work on what you can control. These include:

Minimizing your HTML, Javascript, CSS, and other files. This will help by reducing the amount of data each visitor has to download, speeding up your site.
Compressing Images. This will help similarly to minification by reducing the amount that has to be downloaded.
Using a CDN. Using a content delivery network can help reduce the amount of data that has to be provided by your server, as well as speeding up the delivery of your content by using servers closer to your visitors.
Using Caching. Caching is one of the biggest ways to improve the speed of your webpages. By saving a static version of your site, you can greatly speed up your site.
Optimizing Your Database. This is a bit more technical, but you can optimize your database to speed up your site by adding indexes where needed and by improving your database server’s settings.

Advanced Server Improvement

All About High Availability Clusters

High availability clusters are designed to provide redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring that your website stays online and accessible to users if one of your servers goes down. HA clusters use load balancing to distribute incoming requests evenly across all servers in the cluster and failover techniques to switch over to a secondary server in case of a failure of the primary server.

Hardware requirements for a HA cluster include multiple servers with similar specifications and redundant power and network connections.

Software requirements include an operating system, clustering software, and a load balancer.

Overall, high availability clusters are an effective solution for ensuring website uptime and accessibility, but their set-up and maintenance require careful planning and attention to detail to ensure they work effectively.

Finding hosting that offers high-availability clustering can greatly improve your website’s performance and reliability.

Load Balancing for Speed & Reliability

If you have a larger site, load balancing is one of the best ways to optimize the performance of your site cost-effectively. You can separate your traffic across multiple servers, reducing the load on any one individual server and often improving the speed of your website.

There are 3 main methods of load balancing: DNS load balancing, Hardware load balancing, and Software load balancing.

DNS is the easiest; you just add multiple A records. It’s not very efficient though.
Hardware is the most efficient, but it’s also the hardest to set up and the most expensive.
Software is the most flexible, but it requires more work than DNS load balancing and usually isn’t as efficient as hardware load balancing.

Optimizing Your MySQL Database

This is a bit more of an advanced technique, but you can often greatly improve your website’s speed by optimizing your MySQL database. There are a number of things you can do:

Optimize Your Configuration Files. There are a number of configurations that will allow you to specify the amount of memory you use, optimize the CPU availability, and many other settings. These can greatly improve your server without major upgrades.
Use Indexes. Wherever possible, use indexes to speed up your database queries. Also, if you have a lot of queries that use multiple columns in searches, use multi-column indexes. This is arguably the biggest improvement you can make. It requires some extra disk space, but the speed improvements can be massive.
Normalize Your Database. You can normalize your database and avoid data duplication wherever possible. This happens more in the design phase, but can be very helpful with speed and disk space improvements.
Use Partitions. Partitions break apart your tables into multiple sections to make searching a lot faster. This is a more advanced technique, but you can sometimes see a big improvement on some types of databases.
Optimizing Your Queries. This can take a lot of work, but you can see massive improvements when you optimize your queries. This will generally happen more in the design and coding phases, but it’s definitely worth the extra work in the long term. This is especially true for larger datasets.

For more MySQL database optimizations, please see this article.