I’m covering something I don’t think has been covered a lot before. Most people don’t care about database performance because most people don’t use 1% of their host capabilities. The website I’m talking about in this article was extremely resources hungry and was reaching the limits of the host. I think that’s why I didn’t find a single database performance review of HostGator when I wanted to switch host, but here it is.

Why MySQL Performance?

Before switching hosting company, I ran a lot of tests on the website and one of the most important test I did was to enable GZIP on the website. Enabling GZIP actually cut the size of files like .js and .css by about 85% because it compresses all of them before sending them to the client. What was the result of enabling GZIP on the website? No result. The site wasn’t any faster! The bottleneck really was the database because of the number of entries and that’s where the MySQL performance issue comes into play.

What database are we looking at?

The database is a 150mb database with 975,000 records total and most of these records are stored in three out of the 19 tables. So you can imagine where the requests happen the most right? Most of them happen in these three tables.

Test One

I simply ran two very simple tests. The first one was to run a page load (By making sure to delete the browser’s cache before) with Firebug. If you guys don’t know what Firebug is, it is a VERY useful Firefox plugin for web developers and you can get it here. I ran this test before and after switching hosting company and here are the results:

Before: 48 requests, 275kb, 11.57s

After, with HostGator: 48 requests, 275Kb, 3.94s

To understand these numbers, we have to understand how Firebug calculates the time to load a page. It’s not the actual time it took to display the page, but it’s the time it took to download every single file, added up. The time taken to download the page is actually more like half of that time because a lot of data get processed simultaneously.

Test Two

For the second test, I simply trusted Google. Here are two screen shots from Webmaster tools that show the Google bot activity on the website:

On these two charts, we first see the number of pages crawled per day and the time spent downloading a single page. The red box represent the new host and everything prior to that is the old host. We can clearly see that the time spent downloading a single page went from a top value of something like 3 seconds to an all time low value of about 0.4s! To me, this is what I call a great improvement.

On the first chart we can easily see that because Google spends less time downloading a page, the bot crawls more page every day.

Reseller Vs Shared

I know you guys are saying: “Yeah right, but I won’t pay 25$ a month for a reseller account, my website doesn’t even make 25$ a month! I know, but I tested the shared hosting as well! Ain’t it nice? I know. The results are slightly less impressive, but really good as well so you can go for it without any problems.

Wrapping up

I did not do this to promote HostGator. You know why? Because I think I provided probably the most complete review of HostGator out there by providing real numbers and real results. I didn’t just say: That host’s great man! Cut the crap, there are thousand of great hosts out there! I didn’t just say I like the host, I frickin’ liked my old hosting company and I was really feeling bad to leave them. I did that review because HostGator really is a nice host, with great customer service and the performance is really good.

You know what pissed me off when I tried HostGator? I couldn’t find a single database performance review! What? We’re building websites here, websites receiving thousand of visitors every day, can I care about the load time of my websites? So here it is, HostGator performs really well on resources hungry websites.

Resources hungry

I talked about it, the reason I bought a reseller account is because one of my website is terribly resources hungry. Before I got on the new host, a page could easily take 4-5 seconds to load and I thought this was a pain. In fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some traffic because of that: people would just go away! The main bottleneck was the mysql performance which is SO much faster on the new host: it now only takes 1-2 seconds to load a page. To my great surprised, not only my visitors are happier, but the Google bot seems to like me a little more!

Google loves it

Let’s have a look at these two charts from Google Webmaster tools:

• Number of pages crawled per day

• Average time to download a page

The red arrow marks the point where I switched host. See how the average time spent to download a page significantly dropped AND the number of pages crawled per day significantly increased! I mean, Google spend less time downloading a single page, so it uses the same total time available to download more pages! Isn’t it great?

How does that helps your website?

This will help your website because even if Google spends the same total time on your website, it actually does a lot more during that time. Not only your new pages will get indexed faster, but your other pages will get updated more often.

Some stats?

The site went from 500 uniques a day to 1000 uniques a day in a single week, and it’s increasing a little everyday since them. That’s what I call a good result.

Do I have to go with a better host?

It all depends the type of website you run. If you run a blog with not much traffic and you don’t update very often, that probably won’t make a difference. On the opposite, if you feel your website is really slow to load, you are getting some decent traffic and you update quite often then I’d say go for it!

Be aware that a reseller hosting is something around 25$ a month, so if you’re website doesn’t make 25$ a month, don’t do the upgrade!