Optimize Prestashop in BlueHost

[moy2010]

About two months ago I migrated my hosting from GoDaddy to BlueHost looking for a better performance and compatibility with Prestashop.

 

Since the day 1, I noticed that it was considerably slower than GoDaddy, but the compatibility was better (less problems to make X or Y modification), so it wasn't a big deal.

 

Since a month ago, my website started having issues and going down for long periods (2 or 3 hours), resulting in lost sales for me :S. I investigated what was happening, and found that there were some "slow SQL queries" slowing down my website, and even taking it off-line by reaching the max_connections_per_user limit.

 

I contacted BlueHost about this matter, and they said that their current limit for max connections per user is 15 and they cannot change that. Instead, they recommend to disable the conflicting modules which are poorly coded and resolve the conflicts for the slow SQL queries. Also they recommended to set the PHP Configuration to "PHP 5.2 (FastCGI)".

 

I've done this and the performance increased just a bit. Is anybody else hosting his prestashop store with BlueHost that could give me some advices to improve the performance?

 

I would really appreciate the help that you could provide.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Dh42]

What hosting plan do you have? 15 concurrent connections is horrible. Also, what version of Prestashop are you running?

[moy2010]

I'm using PS 1.4.8.2 and using the professional web hosting plan from BlueHost (about $5 USD a month for at least 12 months.) .

 

I was considering to move to P.S. 1.5 but I think it's too slow and would be counterproductive for my needs. Also, I considered to move to PS 1.4.9 coz it's faster, but the problems with the Paypal module really afraid me :S.

[Dh42]

I would move to 1.4.9 if I were you, it is faster and more stable. If all they are allowing is a 15 concurrent connections, I would run. It sounds like you need a better host.

[moy2010]

Didn't PS 1.4.9 have problems with Paypal?

 

If it doesn't have problems anymore, then I would go for it without doubt.

 

As for the hosting, do you consider HostGator a better option? Or which one would you recommend?

[Dh42]

The module that was released with it did, yes. But if you update to the most recent paypal module after you upgrade, it is stable.

 

I would recommend webhostingbuzz.com it is generally where I run all of my clients sites. www.smiletimedental.org is run off of their gold plan.

[moy2010]

wow, that page gets a really high score in pagespeed insights :|.

 

I've disable some conflicting modules that were slowing down my website (layered navigation and banner (ads) uploader pro), could you please test my website "pcexperts.com.mx" and tell me what do you think about it's speed?

 

Thanks a lot for your help .

[Dh42]

It took about 6 seconds. It seems like a lot of the bottle neck might be in the actual server, but that being said, you can still up the page speed. I have an article on my blog about doing just that in version 1.4. It is actually a 2 part article, but the site I did it on ended up with a 97 score. http://blog.dh42.com/category/prestashop/

[moy2010]

Thanks a lot for your support, Dh42. I've managed to squeeze out some performance from my prestashop store .

 

I had some issues when I put in practice the media servers and the sprites, but that's a different story.

 

Best regards,

 

Moises Garcia.