Dreamhost shared hosting speed

[GhostMaker]

Does anyone have any experience with Dreamhost? I am hosting a website with them and can't seem to get the performance where I want it to be. I think I have done everything within reason to speed up the site ie. using a lightweight theme, caching, Cloudflare CDN, no unnecessary plugins, etc.

Most of the problems seem related to my theme so I will be building a custom theme this weekend. That will be a bit faster but I'm starting to suspect that my host is part of the problem as well. I'm willing to move or upgrade to a better plan if necessary but I was wondering if anyone had anything to share.

Thanks

 

[Darth]

Does anyone have any experience with Dreamhost? I am hosting a website with them and can't seem to get the performance where I want it to be. I think I have done everything within reason to speed up the site ie. using a lightweight theme, caching, Cloudflare CDN, no unnecessary plugins, etc.

Most of the problems seem related to my theme so I will be building a custom theme this weekend. That will be a bit faster but I'm starting to suspect that my host is part of the problem as well. I'm willing to move or upgrade to a better plan if necessary but I was wondering if anyone had anything to share.

Thanks

AFAIK they are owned by the company that also runs Hostgator and dozens of others. They are notoriously slow. You are far better off hosting with a small company that some of the others here will suggest.

 

[kapling]

I've had hosting with so many different co's over the years, but Cloudways have been my favourite for speed/ttfb for the past two years or so. It's generally more expensive than the bottom tier hosts, but performance has been up there with managed dedicated WP hosts for me.

Had one site I couldn't get above 92 on WPX - even after getting rid of Google Analytics - hit 98 with nothing else changed except migrating to Cloudways.

They've partnered with a few of those SaaS versions of Honey targeted at 'startups' — not sure what's kosher to post on here yet, but I can think of at least two that give you 20% cashback for life when you sign up to Cloudways through them.

It's a little complicated to get your head around as they don't hold your hand like providers like Dreamhost/GoDaddy/etc will (you'll need your own smtp service for example), but since you're working with CDN's and caching plugins I doubt it's something you can't handle and the speeds are worth it imo. They also have a free site migration service that will bring across your site and settings, so you could try it out on their free trial and if it doesn't work out, you can be back up and running in the time it takes your DNS to propagate.