HostGator, one of the hosts I use for my company recently upgraded their server to a 16 core with tons of memory and it is pretty fast.
Here is a comparison between what I was getting on the Dreamhost VPS and Hostgator:
Dreamhost VPS:
The VPS could be fast, but then suddenly have slow hits and it averaged out at about 6 seconds.
HostGator:
Sub two second times are possible now and the site is running php 5.4! All right! The average will be closer to 4 second though.
I also enabled W3 Total Cache and what a difference! The server went from being barely able to handle 10 concurrent users to over 75. Here is a test result using “seige” which had 75 concurrent users bashing the site over three minutes.
Transactions: 1834 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 179.57 secs
Data transferred: 33.20 MB
Response time: 2.19 secs
Transaction rate: 10.21 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.18 MB/sec
Concurrency: 22.42
Successful transactions: 1834
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 10.72
Shortest transaction: 0.41
Two things of note: No failed transactions and the transaction rate is 10trans/sec. I tried 100 concurrent users, but crashed my local router, so the server should be able to handle a lot more.
I also fixed a bunch of dead incoming links, mostly from Wikipedia, to the old “index.php?id=1120” TYPO3 variety which now redirect to the correct pages. I also readded the Understanding Pamphlet page which was in the list of pages here, but not in the menu.
Sean.