Server response time 3 seconds?

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egoomni
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Hello!
This page https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ tells me that:
"In our test, your server responded in 3 seconds. There are many factors that can slow down your server response time. "
So this problem is new.. and I am wondering what happened with your services? will this problem persist? an should I change my hosting?
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stephanmontreal
Hi Arnel - we experince the same issue with InMotionHosting's server response time. We too measured with Google's Page Speed tool at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

We are an InMotionhosting customer with a VPS (Virtual Private Server), not shared hosting - and our server response time is nonetheless at an inacceptable 1.6 seconds - the acceptable standard is at 200ms (0.2 seconds) - according to Google, who should know. Interestingly, we used Google's Page Speed tool to measure the server response time of InMotionHosting.com, your own website - low and behold, server response times seem to be well under the acceptable 200 ms margin for server load time for your own website. So it seems that InMotionHosting knows how to achieve the standard for its own installations, which is good to know.

You are referring to GMetrix as the tool you are using to measure server response times, but it appears that GMetrix is not providing test results for server response times. The speed at which a page loads is depending on a variety of factors as you know: Server response time, CSS optimizations, Image optimizations, WordPress caching, Script minifying, etc... Whilst web developers can take care of all the rest, we cannot take care of server response times - they are entirely depending on InMotionHosting infrastructure. Dixit Google : "There are dozens of potential factors which may slow down the response of your server: slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation, or memory starvation. You need to consider all of these factors to improve your server's response time."

So we are wondering: If we are paying for (costly) VPS with InMotionHosting - shouldn't we be entitled to access acceptable server response times? Or do you in our case also recommend to VPS customers that we should upgrade to 'dedicated servers' as was suggested to your 'shared hosting' customer?

Your answer will be very much appreciated.
Stephan Becker
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Arn
Hello Egoomni,

Thanks for the question about your server response time. The issue of server response times when looking at a website is a complex one, and shouldn't be based on looking solely at a single instance in time or evaluated by a single source. Depending on what your website is loading, 3 seconds actually might be a good time for the website loading speed. You're also on a shared server where resources are not just dedicated to one site. If you want all of the server resources to be dedicated to you, then you may wish to upgrade to a dedicated server. I also took your website through a popular 3rd party performance testing suite called Gtmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/reports/reacalifornia.com/vKip3H8b). If you check the site, it reports what is causing your site to be slow - though it graded it with a 94% which is not really considered that slow.

Based on the Gtmetrix results, the PageSpeed insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server) and our evaluation when loading your site in several different browsers, the website seems to be performing optimally. Is there room for improvement? Yes. However, that lies within alteration and optimization of your website code. Much of this information is provided within Gtmetrix or the PageSpeed Insights recommendations.

We also evaluated the multiple websites within your account to verify if the issue was truly server related and they all receive different grades from the evaluation tools. This indicates the issue to be more code-based than server-based.

Based on 3rd party evaluations, it looks like your website performance on the server is good. If you wish to move to another host we can't stop you, though we hope that the information we have given above indicate that there is not an issue with the hosting server.

I hope this helps to answer your question, please let us know if you require any further assistance.

Regards,
Arnel C.