In an earlier post I lamented some issues we had been having with the SMUG service, in that pages were taking inordinately long to load: sometimes as long as 45 seconds, and occasionally even having some “timeouts.” Not the kind of timeouts modern parents give their children in lieu of spankings, but the kind that made me want to spank my hosting service provider.
Bill Ferris (@billfer) offered some good pointers in response, and suggested that I call my hosting provider to see if we could clarify the problem. But then, having applied some of his tips (and deactivating a couple of plug-ins), the response times seemed to get somewhat better.
So, like the typical male who cancels the doctor appointment when he starts feeling a little better, or who just learns to live with a little nagging health concern instead of getting to the root of the problem, I let the situation continue.
Yesterday, though, I had the blog equivalent of an out-of-hospital-cardiac arrest. When I tried to visit SMUG I got an “unable to create database connection error” message, and got a similar message when I tried to access my WordPress dashboard. The WordPress error message suggested I might want to contact my hosting service.
So I called GoDaddy, and as often happens the problem went away while I was on hold. But the friendly customer service guy checked into it further with those on the technical side, and apparently there had been some problems with the server on which SMUG is hosted, and they were in the process of solving them.
When I Tweeted about the issue, @paulacassin said:
@LeeAase YES! It’s not blindingly fast, but 3-4secs. Much better than before. 🙂 Looks like they tweaked something the right way
…and Monty Flinsch (@mflinsch) echoed the assessment.
So it appears we may have solved the problem. To confirm it, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment indicating the approximate page load time you’re experiencing, and what kind of Internet service you have (i.e. T1, cable, dial-up, etc.)
I hope it’s not blindingly fast, because I would hate to be responsible for vision loss, but it would be nice if it could be just a little blurry, like Michael Johnson in the 200 meters.