I have been using UMD since 2010, and over the last few years, I've noticed that the site has become extremely slow from Europe. Each page takes 3 to 5 seconds to load, and videos frequently buffer, even though I'm on fiber-optic. As a result, I don't visit the site as much as I used to.
I understand that UMD.net is hosted in the US and not in Europe, but I also have websites hosted in Europe that load in 500ms from the US. I believe there is room for improvement.
I'm in Canada and it's painfully slow for me too... so much so I don't even like waiting anymore for the photos to load. It's like being on dialup in 1995.
It can be one of 2 things typically, the Host or the network Peering. I did a trace route and found it going all over the place from my location in Toronto to the Host in Las Vegas.
This is the lengthy route it takes for me from Toronto -> Ashburn Virginia -> Charlotte NC -> Atlanta GA -> Dallas TX -> Las Vegas NV. So it loops all over the USA. So not a direct route as it could be. This is the result of a low cost backbone carrier flexential.net. If they are cheeping out on the carrier it's likely the result of a cheep host. If that's the case the host will likely be oversold and it's resources will be spread thin. If it's doing shared resources and you have some heavy users as neighbors on the same server or cloud you'll experience slow response times. Clearly this site is run on a budget host.
It's absolutely as slow as molasses lately. This has been posted before and did I see a mod or someone from admin team trying to explain it away as "probably our internet speeds?" Well, I'm on fiber, with 1,000 megs upload/download so this is 100% on their end and I hope they fix it. My best guess? They're on crappy shared hosting and unwilling to pay for dedicated hosting.
No, it's not our internet speed, as @I Love Mud 2 mentioned; it's related to their hosting provider. Also, UMD does not use any CDN, such as Cloudflare, and still uses HTTP/1.1. Upgrading to HTTP/2 would significantly speed up image loading. Additionally, using NGINX instead of Apache could improve the site's performance as well.
MessyGoon said: No, it's not our internet speed, as @I Love Mud 2 mentioned; it's related to their hosting provider. Also, UMD does not use any CDN, such as Cloudflare, and still uses HTTP/1.1. Upgrading to HTTP/2 would significantly speed up image loading. Additionally, using NGINX instead of Apache could improve the site's performance as well.
They're using Godaddy hosting which is, by far, the single worst host on the planet = why this is is so slow. Also 100% correct about them not using a CDN, makes this site drag even worse.
I'm in the UK, and some days the site is that slow I just log out and don't bother! While I'm sure one of the reasons is the time of day and how many people are online at the same time the other issue could be admin not removing old posts and old videos from the site and keeping it fresh.
Slowness on a site like this is never down to your local broadband speed, it's the international carriers and the hosting network at the far end. Having said that, I've not noticed any slowness recently. It was painfully slow for a while in high summer, but that was a temporary glitch MM has since fixed, and I find it quite responsive at the moment from here in Yorkshire.
CDNs are great - means the conrtent comes from a datacentre in the nearest city instead of from the other side of the planet - but they also cost serious money. Disney and Netflix and Youtube can afford them. Independent sites like UMD, rather less so.
I believe the owner of the site is from Las Vegas, so it makes sense that he decided to host it there. But, honestly, that's not a good location, it's a city in the middle of the desert. A better choice would be the east coast.
Cloudflare is also completely free for images and static content, but you need to exclude videos from it, as caching large videos in their CDN is not allowed unless you pay for it. I'm caching 20 TB per month on the free plan on one of my websites.
Love you, too
VIP Coupons