Thanks for the offer Nige, though I'm not sure how practical that would be as microphoto is about 900 pages, and has a few gb of photos (1500 or so images) I think now.

Trying to tidy up the databases, I've noticed that microphotos database is 43mb. Isn't that quite big, or is that a product of having so many pages in wordpress?

It's probably down to all the media references in the db moreso than the pages themselves making the db so big, its not excessively large.

the clues might be in that quote up there.

1. you're running 6 different engines/instances out of one 'cheap and cheerful' hosting package. that can't be helping can it?

2. they say nothing is caching, which is quite telling. can you verify this statement?

You should probably update your joomla installations to the latest version too, there's a lot of J!1.5 hacking going on, you really need to be on 1.5.26 or whatever the latest is to fix some of the security holes.

I'd say migrate to 2.5/3 but its a real PITA to do.

Yeah, the issue is those sites are fine "as is" and I don't particularly want to have to fix anything that updating might break

Things are caching according to GTMetrix, though I hadn't enabled the settings that Hostgator recommends used in WP Supercache.

Still tweaking, but getting there slowly. I've deleted about 10 databases for installations that no longer exist.

Quote from: bytejunkie on August 21, 2013, 12:01:25 PM
1. you're running 6 different engines/instances out of one 'cheap and cheerful' hosting package. that can't be helping can it?

I know I'm pushing what is reasonable to expect on shared hosting, but it doesn't mean I should just sit back and go "meh, it's shared hosting". I'm just trying to make sure that everything is running as well as I can get it, with what is available to me

I don't think a handful of low traffic sites should be running slowly on shared hosting at all. Microphoto is the only one that potentially could because of the volume of content, but the caching working correctly should resolve that.

How is microphoto behaving now to you guys? I've pretty much either updated or uninstalled any of the websites that were out of date, the remaining ones are all cached as per hostgators documentation.

There's still a brief pause from clicking a link to something happening, but it does seem to be loading a lot snappier to me now?

It seems hit and miss for me, I'm guessing the pages that haven't been cached yet are the ones taking time to load.

Might preload the cache I guess.

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on August 21, 2013, 12:51:16 PM
I don't think a handful of low traffic sites should be running slowly on shared hosting at all.

is it still accurate to say that on cheap hosting they're not fighting each other, but the other instances of AMP on that physical server and they might be slowing because of that?

Perhaps, but what I'm getting at more is that no shared hosting should really be that slow that you can't run a handful of small, low traffic sites with good response times, his biggest site is effectively just a photo gallery so shouldn't be slow. I don't think it's a very good host otherwise.

I upgraded the hosting package for tekforums because we seemed to be hitting a wall from the volume of db requests, the server hasn't dropped for any significant amount of time since. But I'm also running an eCommerce site and a bunch of other fairly low traffic sites on the hosting package, so I expected to have to upgrade at some point to keep things slick for everyone.