Looking for advice on what sort of best web hosting (and specifications) or host I need for my specific need. I’m looking for speed in the back end.
All the work we do is managing lists of customers (with plugins) the wp-admin dashboard. I’m looking for fast page refreshes when loading the user lists, etc.
My current host is Siteground GoGeek. It runs fast for our webshop at the front end, so all good there for the public. But all the phone orders, customers we process in the wp-admin back end is very, very slow, often 504, 524 errors,… (all too technical for me, but have all buffers, etc. set to limits of siteground plan, timeouts, etc…)
Answers:
Get an object cache installed. It will help cache commonly accessed data and stores a copy of the result in memory. Can make a big difference if you have a lot of complicated database queries happening in the backend. Not sure if Site ground has something like memcache.d or Redis available to use as an object cache.
I had the same issue with SiteGround GoGeek. 504 errors unless caching enabled – and they just said disable plugins or restore a backup – not helpful. Tried the site on some other hosts and none had that issue, clearly a platform/config problem on their side. I ended up choosing Guru which is a UK based and uses LightSpeed. So fast in comparison even with no caching in place. You’ll also get good performance on cloud VPS solutions like RunCloud, Cloudways. Backend tasks can be quite intensive so may not be instant, just a second or two, you should never get 504 errors.
Spec wise, it depends on traffic and complexity but most good providers will give you a graph of resource usage so you can see if you are hitting your resource limits. As a minimum, coming from GoGeek you’ll want 1 CPU and 2 GB. Double this can it could cope with a lot on a fast host.
Have you tried monitoring SQL queries? I would start with that. Sometimes problems can be solved by adding an index or picking a different database engine.
In parallel I would investigate hosts that offer high performance. Some like pantheon, sitedistrict and if you others will allow you a free account to try things out.
Could also be your database doesn’t have enough memory causing the database to use the storage disk which is much slower than RAM. If that’s the case you will need to give it more RAM to use aka a bigger server.
Some hosts limit the max number of connections, workers, etc to protect the server from heavy loads, so they don’t affect other sites on the same server. It’s a good thing… unless you need more resources. Upgrade the plan to purchase more resources, or optimize the site, or both.
Some hosts don’t protect the server, and pack accounts on, in which case you have sporadic sluggishness but works good some of the time, depending on how busy other sites are, until it’s so packed that it’s slow all the time.