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.