I completed the migration to a new Liquid Web new server yesterday, and so far I’m very happy with the support Liquid Web provide and the speed of the new server. Despite, getting a sweet deal previously from PowerVPS, I decided to move on Thursday after attending a workshop at Google’s UK offices on Thursday. In the workshop they explained some of the factors that influence where sites appear within search listings, and one of those was how fast the site was.
This news really made me think about how my slow pages could be affecting Google’s opinion of my site, and then it made think that users and also potential advertisers could be forming a bad opinion because of the site speed. Things had got to the point, where even I didn’t want to do certain tasks with my site because it would take too long! I’m certain now that over the last couple of months, my slow server has:
- influenced my Google traffic by lowering my Quality Score
- lost me traffic as readers may leave before a page loads or can’t access a page because the site is down
- lost me traffic because readers are less inclined to look around
- lost me feed subscribers because readers have had a bad experience
- cost me advertisers
- cost me revenue, as some ads won’t have loaded by the time the reader leaves and users won’t be able to click on them
The new server from Liquid Web should help to address these problems, as well as giving me enough capacity to handle the next growth spurt with my blogs, (I have two others including Windows 7 News) which are now generating around 60k page impressions a day on average. I’m fairly certain now that I will be able to recoup the extra server cost, whilst providing my readers with a better experience.
The server still needs a bit tweaking, but regular readers should be able to spot the faster speed already. For those of you who are interested in the spec of my Liquid Web server, here it is:
- Processor: Dual Xeon E5405 Quad Core (Harpertown)
- Memory: 4GB DDR2 PC5300
- Hd1: 160GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache x2 (RAID)
- Hd2: 160GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
- OS: Linux – CentOS 5
- ControlPanel: CPanel / Web Host Manager (+ServerSecure) (+Fantastico/XController)
- Bandwidth: 4800GB Monthly Transfer (2400 in + 2400 out)
