Shared Hosting Speed

Paszt

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Anyone have experience with shared hosting?

I have a website for a funeral home that is using a shared hosting plan. It's a fairly simple site; mostly static pages, a couple of pages that pull info from a SQL server database to display obituaries and merchandise, and an admin section for adding the obituaries and merchandise. The website uses a maximum of 200Mb data transfer per month (averaging 100Mb/month) and a maximum of 15 users per day.
I have had problems with the speed and assumed it was my connection and not the server. But recently I included a comments and suggests form and have received several comments saying that the pages were loading incredibly slow, all from people with cable connections.
Tech support at the hosting company say the server is running fine and always suggest upgrading to the plan that includes dedicated app pools.

So my questions are:
With what I assume is a site with very low resource demands, should I need a dedicated app pool?
Is there a way to accurately test the speed of the server?

The url to the site: http://salemfh.com - any criticism is welcome.
 
The Funeral_Home_and_Sign.png image of 119KB should be converted to a Jpg image at 95% quality which will become 37KB without noticable quality loss. Beware of Png images as they often are 10 times the size of a regular Jpg. Webpages are fragile to lots of small parts that in total make a large page size. This would have a VERY large impact on modem access.

I ran a Windows TraceRT and PathPing command, didn't find anything particular except that one of the SprintLink routers was dropping a lot of packets, I think that perhaps is the transatlantic fiber route (or perhaps that was the Global Crossing nodes? :)) . This maybe the reason I wait 2 seconds before your server replies, but I get no noticable slow loading of the first page. It looks as your are on a Peer1 host (or affiliated?)

Maybe this or related services help analyze performance: http://www.tracert.com/index.html (free registration for Web site performance measurement (Speed-Meter)) Currently there are two limitations: for any single object it is 120Kbyte, for the whole page it is 200K.
 
Thanks for catching the photo size problem JohnH. I must have got my pictures mixed up during the last ftp upload.
I have optimized the photo using many different settings and file types and found that an optimized png was smaller than jpg, it surprised me too. I used both photoshop and Paint Shop Pro with an exhaustive variation of settings.
Thanks too for the link to TraceRT.com, that's exactly what I was looking for. It's great the way they store the results of all the measurements.
 
I would still appreciate an answer to the original question:

Does anyone have experience with shared hosting?
With what I assume is a site with very low resource demands, should I need a dedicated app pool?

And additional, but related questions:

Is it common for shared hosting servers to be unavailable for an entire day? This has happened many times. The tech support says some other site has poor coding which crashes the server and they won't recycle more than once a day.
Again, I would appreciate anyone with shared hosting experience to let me know if they have had this kind of experiences. Is this normal for shared hosting?
 
The problem with sharing an AppPool is that if someone else has bad code in their site that takes down the IIS process, your site will go down. A separate AppPool will isolate your web site into its own IIS process. If you are fighting your host about something like this, you're with the wrong host! Try a host such as DiscountASP, Fastservers.net, etc. When the asp.netPRO readers choice awards come out, there is a section in there about hosting, take a look at the sites on their list for more ideas.
 
To be fair to the host, they do offer a dedicated appPool for twice the price I'm currently paying. It still seems like a good price. All the packages are so different its hard to compare. I guess its true what they say though, you get what you pay for.

The thing that seems strange to me is that when the site goes down, its always the ASP.NET part. Any static HTML pages are available, just not the ASP.NET resources. I would think that ASP.NET and IIS would be installed on the same server. Can they sometimes be installed on different servers?
 
true

yes you are right, you get what you are paying for.

Sometimes there are companies that offer cheeper dedicated app pool shared hosting plans. I host with www.hostinput.com and they are great on helm and dedicated app pool.

thanks
manda
 
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