I’ve been using my Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop as my main business machine since I started my company. It’s pretty good, pretty fast, but I’m now planning to move one of my other desktops to my office and use it as my primary machine.
It’s a Dell, about 2 years old, but was purchased as a game machine so it’s still much faster than the laptop. However, it’s got an enormous old-style 19″ monitor. Huge. Looks like an old TV. I’ve been dreading carting that thing up the stairs.
I use Google Analytics on my retail site and have been since about the end of September. This morning I noticed that the home page was verrrry slow to load (about 5-6 seconds on a cable modem), so I contacted Hostgator.
They checked it out and found that the server was not being flaky, but they noticed that they could see the Javascript call to the Analytics site in the status bar. I couldn’t see that myself, but I went online and found that there are a lot of comments about Analytics slowing down websites. Many of them seem to be because people put the Javascript code in the header rather than at the bottom of the page, but mine was already at the bottom, so that wasn’t it.
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Yes, I know it’s been way too long since I last posted. I do know. But things have been very busy lately; we were working on getting our retail site ready for the holidays, and holiday shopping is now in full swing.
Over Thanksgiving (and I mean all fricking day), we did testing on the speed of the retail site’s server and found it was performing at a level of ‘poor’ or ‘fair’ all the time. So I decided (maybe with not quite enough forethought) that a virtual private server (VPS) might be the answer. I thought we were bogging down due to the sum total of activity on the shared server and that switching to one where we’d have a guaranteed amount of space and bandwidth all the time might be better.
I’ve talked before about how happy I was with my current host. Their tech support was outstanding – until a few days before Thanksgiving when I opened up the VPS account.
