How to Speed up the Semi-Dedicated Server

**aviz** · 03-19-2007, 12:20 PM

How to Speed up the Semi-Dedicated Server?
What Addon Feature should be purchased to speed up the Loading Speed of pages?

Advice

**jason** · 03-19-2007, 01:00 PM

Semi-dedicated is just a shared account with fewer neighbors on your server. There are no "add-ons" that you can buy to speed it. Since there are fewer accounts on a semi-dedicated box your pages should theoretically load faster than pages on normal shared (although there are too many factors involved to guarantee this).

There are several things you can do to speed up download times, though:
* optimize your images-use the greatest compression level you can while maintaining acceptable quality, make sure your images are saved at the same dimensions as you are displaying them on the page, and specify height and width attibutes in your HTML so that the browser has an easier time rendering the page while it waits for the image to finish downloading.
* remove any JavaScript and CSS that is repeated on every page - if you include common external files instead of placing all the code in the <head> of your document you allow the browser to cache the information and not download it on every page load.
* use standard, well formed markup and CSS - removing your formatting information from your sites HTML means smaller downloads. Moving the CSS into an external files (see previous tip) cuts down on download size even more.
* if you are using a dynamically generated site (nuke, etc.), consider doing server-side caching of pages that don't change frequently. If the page doesn't have to be regenerated with the request the total request time will be reduced.
* consider gzipping your page content (see mod_gzip, phpbuilder.com) before sending it to the browser--it'll make your download time shorter and save you bandwidth, but there are issues with some browsers.
* review your site's code and rewrite it in a more efficient manner, if possible

Sorry, there is no easy answer, but with some of these techniques and a bit of trial and error you can probably make some improvements.

--Jason