A quick shout out of praise to Host Gator, where I now host all my websites … a little over a year ago I moved GBMINI to Hostgator, after first testing them with GPMINI.net. Recently, my other website MargaretAndIan was slowing badly on the old hosting, so I moved it (and MINIsOnTop to Hostgator too.
I’ve been noticing that M&I doesn’t respond as quickly as GBMINI – it’s much better than it was at Geekstorage, but it’s just not quite as snappy. A traceroute says there’s no routing issue, so I wondered if the hosting server for M&I was not as good as that for GBMINI.
Tonight, at 9pm, I sent a support note, asking if there was an issue. In under an hour I got a response, saying they’d checked, found no issue, and maybe it was a routing problem. Standard response no doubt.
At 10pm, I replied again, with traceroute data, and suggested the issue seemed to be possibly with the SQL server rather than with the web server itself.
Now, again in less than 45 minutes, I got this answer:
What seemed to be a issue was that the mysql tables were not optimized. I have optimized all tables for you and the site now loads in under 2 second relatively like the other site loads on the second server. If you still see any issues with this in the future and have had us enable ssh access you can run this command mysqlcheck -u iancull -p –optimize –all-databases this will scan and optimize all databases for your user.
And they’re right; M&I is more responsive now!
So apart from not knowing anything about mysql table optimization, I am just amazed that Hostgator support will go to such an extent of checking all this out, and identifying and fixing the issue. I’d have expected a simple “no, everything’s fine”, but I got much better!
