So on Tuesday (21st of June) I moved away from my VPS server in Columbus, Ohio. Recently I’ve been having A LOT of issues with high I/O wait and problems with Apache running slow and in return it failing and having to restart. However the service wasn’t restarting correctly and it just “failed”. I was having to constantly restart the server and/or Apache because of slow load times. It was even as bad as upon publishing a post in WordPress sometimes, the server would just crash. Nothing in the error logs, nothing. All of this leads back to the high I/O wait in my investigations which makes sense, however the company I was dealing with wouldn’t listen and just kept assuring me nothing was wrong. The general staff of the company are great and fantastic, it’s just their VPS team I had problems with.
So on Tuesday morning I ordered some new hosting (Much cheaper mind you so doing my wallet a huge favor), from a company here in Sydney, Australia. Much closer to me and 80% of the visitors to me and my clients websites. I migrated all my domains over to the new hosting and changed the name servers on the domains to point to the new server. First thing I couldn’t believe is the load time, The ping between me and the new server is <20ms whereas the ping from me to the old VPS in Columbus was >300ms. When I click send and receive in Outlook now, I barely even see the dialogue flash because it just loads so much faster. Page load time on my domains is MUCH faster. I’ve noticed a near instant load time of 98% of my websites. I just couldn’t be happier. I did however have a problem with the memory allocation on some of my domains but that was taken care of within 5 seconds of me notifying someone and finding out how to allocate more memory.
As for the old VPS hosting? I requested a cancellation and a partial refund for the remaining time left of the month I paid for, only to be contacted asking me to talk to their VPS team about sorting my issues out. I simply just replied asking them to do as I had asked as it was beyond trying to talk to someone as I had tried that for 3+ months now. To which I woke up this morning to an email from PayPal and the company notifying me that a FULL refund of this month had been arranged and should appear back in my bank account. So I was very pleased in the resolution with cancelling and refunding the money for my VPS.
The thing you should take away from this? Just remember hosting is MUCH better in the country of which majority of your visitors originate from. They will experience a pleasanter visit just simply because of page load times. Australia’s web hosting has gotten better in the past few years, it used to be simply TOO EXPENSIVE however that has improved tremendously but still has a way to come to be perfect. I’m also glad I’m supporting a great and local company now.