De Valdez

Over a year ago, Google released a tool called Page Speed which gave simple suggestions to developers interested in speeding up their sites. Typically these suggestions were not too difficult, and if you were already aware of many front-end best practices (as relating to HTML, CSS, and Javascript) you likely implemented such suggestions to begin with, or soon after hearing about this tool. But, some of the recommendations, particularly relating to server configuration may have been too complicated or possibly inaccessible if on a shared hosting environment.
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I’ve been with MediaTemple under their shared and acclaimed grid service for almost two years. In the beginning it was great. And even though it was on the high end of pricing it was still reasonable for the support they gave. As a beginner I don’t regret using them as my first hosting company. However, after implementing nearly ten sites that all require their own database the server became increasingly slow. It got to the point where email accounts and entire sites just wouldn’t be served up, and part of the reason was heavy weekend traffic on the grid.

If my websites are down because Ma’ is taking a sunday drive through google town, I’m probably not going to attract too many new clients. So, I decided to jump ship. Considering that I needed private hosting and the ability to heavily modify the server’s configuration I chose to go with one of these new fangled “unmanaged” hosts (do it yourself) http://linode.com. I end up paying less, but getting much more powerful hardware.
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