WooCommerce too slow: from shared hosting to VPS

You have a WooCommerce website, many plugins, traffic, visitors and sales are growing but the website is sluggish even after caching and it takes seconds to add a product to the cart or to load a page. This happens because your shared hosting plan has reached its limits and your website needs a faster server to accommodate the growing demand. Let's analyze the reasons for the poor performance and see what solutions are available.

Why it's slow

• Shared hosting providers cut corners: Hundreds of websites may be hosted on a single physical computer where each website contends CPU, memory and database I/O with every other tenant on the same machine. This is why it is called shared hosting. This arrangement usually works fine, but only as long as most of these neighboring websites are small and have low traffic. When a few tenants run demanding websites, the host machine is starved of CPU time, memory allocation and disk I/O to the point of slowing down every other website on that machine.
• Old shared servers: The servers used by your shared hosting provider are likely 10-year-old Intel Xeon with abysmal performance. You can verify this by running the command

  cat /proc/cpuinfo

  which will tell you the exact CPU model, and from it you can determine the manufacturing date. In fact, when servers age and become too old for regular applications, they don't go straight to the landfill or a recycling center, but are frequently purchased second-hand by shared hosting providers and remain in service in those environments for several more years. This makes economic sense for most lightweight websites, but they are inadequate for heavy websites.
• WooCommerce runs on PHP: PHP is an interpreted language used to build most of today's web apps. It is slow, bug-prone, and incapable, yet people just can't seem to stop using it. It is approximately 5 to 50 times slower than NodeJS depending on what benchmarks are considered, and unfortunately WooCommerce, WordPress and most web forums are built on it.

Solutions

Your website needs a faster server. Let's analyze the hardware requirements for a heavy WooCommerce website that runs too slow on shared hosting:

• CPU: 2 dedicated AMD Epyc or Ryzen vCores. Contrarily to a shared hosting plan, a dedicated vCore is a hardware thread reserved for your exclusive use that is not shared with any other tenant on the host machine. Its performance is guaranteed and remains constant over time regardless of how much load the other tenants generate. Avoid Intel vCores because cloud providers that offer Intel servers tend to use outdated Xeon chips due to their lower cost. The single-thread performance of these Xeons is often too weak, whereas Ryzen and Epyc CPUs have much stronger cores and are typically more recent acquisitions in virtualized environments.
• RAM: Opt for 4 GB of RAM to have enough space for the database, for the in-memory disk cache and for the PHP interpreter. This doesn't cost much and ensures that memory allocation algorithms complete quickly without wasting time managing fragmentation.
• Disk: I recommend about 30 to 100 GB of fast SSD or NVMe storage depending on how much data you intend to store. Avoid mechanical hard drives because they are too slow especially for database queries.
• Network: 1 Gbps is a good choice for an ecommerce website that is picking up on customers' demand; it can sustain 125 MB/s of data transfer to and from the customers' computers.

Recommendations from the database

These are some VPSs currently found in the database that meet the requirements defined above; by arbitrary choice they are all hosted in the USA. You can customize your query and search for more VPSs using the form on the sidebar. All results are dynamically generated from the database.

Cheap VPS Hosting in Moldova

If you’re considering a VPS in Moldova for personal projects, such as a VPN, hosting warez, or a torrent seedbox, this article is for you. VPS providers in this region are somewhat shielded from copyright strikes and specialize in offering high-bandwidth configurations ranging from 30 to 50 TB per month. These configurations are suitable for sharing large volumes of data, and most providers even ignore DMCA copyright takedown requests.

Below is a list of the cheapest root servers currently available in the database for VPS hosting in Moldova. You can refine your query using the form on the sidebar. All results are dynamically generated from the database, and the monthly prices are calculated by dividing the annual prices by 12. Note that not all providers may offer monthly billing terms.

Cheap VPS Hosting in Finland (2024)

Are you considering moving to a VPS server for your Finnish users? Our latest guide on cheap VPS hosting in Finland has all the information you need. We’ve compiled a list of cheap VPS and cloud providers with data centers located in Finland. Let’s dive into the best options for hosting your web applications.

• CPU: A single Intel core can easily run a web server and a database with low load. If you're looking for a more powerful root server, 2 Intel cores perform better than most shared hosting plans.
• RAM: Most small websites require one to two GB of RAM to run properly; if unsure, opt for 2 GB.
• Disk: A 15 GB disk may be sufficient and will help reduce hosting costs, but for better flexibility, you should choose at least 20 GB.
• Network: To minimize latency and maximize speed for clients in Finland, a 1 Gbps network link is recommended. Don't opt for less unless your service has low traffic.
• Virtualization: If your VPS stores any kind of sensitive data, such as costumer emails or passwords, KVM is the recommended virtualization type for its secure isolation from the host. Otherwise, LXC permits further cost saving.

Recommendations from the database

Here are some matches currently found in the database that are hosted in Finland and satisfy the requirements above. You can search for more VPSs using the form on the sidebar. All results are dynamically generated from the database, and the monthly prices are obtained by dividing the annual prices by 12. Note that not all providers may offer monthly billing terms.

Cheapest VPS for Discord Bot

The hardware requirements for hosting a Discord bot are extremely low and therefore the range of suitable VPSs is among the cheapest. The bot may be coded in NodeJS, Python, Perl or any other scripting language, and a database like MySQL may be used to store permanent data across sessions. Let's analyze the hardware requirements.

• CPU: Assuming that most operations performed by the bot are API calls toward Discord itself or toward third-party endpoints, a single Intel Xeon core would be capable of running multiple instances of the script, concurrently. This will hold true unless you plan to use the bot for more CPU-intensive tasks, like transcoding audio or video or processing data with neural networks.
• RAM: Most interpreted scripts rarely consume more than 200 MB of RAM, and a small MySQL database can fit in just 500 MB as well. Unless you plan for millions of database records, a VPS with 2 GB of RAM should suffice and have memory to spare for the rest of the operating system.
• Disk: 10 GB on spinning rust is the minimum viable storage size for a small bot with a small database. If you think you'll need more, costs will rise accordingly.
• Network: Network latency and speed are presumably not that important unless you can clearly identify why they would be. If this is the correct assumption for your use case, a mere 100 Mbps hosted in any location on Earth will allow you to significantly cut costs. However, you still probably need one IPv4 address to connect to most API endpoints, as IPv6 is not yet universally supported.
• Virtualization: KVM and LXC are both viable options for a VPS that simply runs a bot and possibly a database. Most often, people prefer KVM over LXC due to its better flexibility and stronger security isolation, but for a simple Discord bot this distinction may not be significant.

Recommendations from the database

Here are some matches currently found in the database that satisfy all the requirements listed above. You can search for more VPSs using the form on the sidebar. All results are dynamically generated from the database, and the monthly prices are obtained by dividing the annual prices by 12. Note that not all providers may offer monthly billing terms.