The biggest misunderstanding ever

It appears to be really simple to understand, yet, many people still believe in miracles – also happening in the hosting-sphere. They experience some (sometimes serious) performance issues with their Drupal site(s) and they assume it is their host fault, or maybe also partially Drupal fault, so they start shopping for some better host, preferably high performance one, who will guarantee their sites will became speed monsters, instantly.

The truth is naturally different – your Drupal site can run ‘fast-enough’ on almost any server, so long as you don’t try to host Drupal with 10k users and 1M nodes on some shared, cheap hosting for masses.

Of course there are some platforms known to cause serious performance issues ‘out-of-the-box’, like entire Virtuozzo family, which is well known as the worst choice for Drupal ever – at least since their v.4, because of dramatically bad I/O performance (and maybe some other reasons under the hood).

But any other platform, like Xen for example, will serve very well, if you have built your Drupal site right – and really, there are many ways to do it wrong – either by choosing not scalable modules like ‘forum’ or by following ‘open buffet syndrome’ and using 150+ modules you think you can’t live without, and finally by doing some crazy things in your views or panels configuration, to name just a few, common reasons why your Drupal site is slooooow.

Now you have found your dream host, Omega8.cc and you think – ‘Yeah! All my performance problems are finally gone!’. No no, they are not gone at all! Sure, your sites will be much, much faster here, but because we use automated scaling for available resources, your buggy site will attempt to eat them all! Then what you could expect? Of course we will contact you and tell you that you have a big problem, which needs to be fixed ASAP, or your Aegir instance will be disabled due to permanent resources abuse (ouch!).

You probably didn’t expect to hear that, but do you really believe that it is a good idea to add more power to your car when some of its gears are broken? Do you really believe that replacing your car’s main engine will fix your broken wheels? Probably not, so why do you believe it will work for your website?

Sometimes it will be not that bad and the site will still work here faster anyway, but why not to get it fixed properly and running really 100x faster all the time, as advertised?

So, what do we recommend?

Always fix your real issues first and start shopping for better host only if the site is still running slow, while you are sure you did everything to build it properly. And remember about our motto:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry