Tag: BlueHost vs DreamHost

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been walking on a very thin sheet of ice. WordPress 2.7 came out and life was wonderful, plugins were getting updated almost daily and things seemed to be just fine. Then out of no where I found a twisted up wrench on the ground, and wouldn’t you know it all the gears to the blogs were sitting right next to it.

Sabotage!!! Some hates me,,, No actually somewhere in the midst of all the updates one of the plugins came back just a little more beefed up than I expected.

Gigpress is pretty awesome plugin with some great options and great widgets. It’s fairly easy to manipulate and the php is easy to understand if you want to mess with the guts. But!!! Gigpress does a lot of work so it comes with a lot of queries, usually not a problem, but the latest version mixed with the Bluehost server didn’t cut it.

Here me out though, Gigpress isn’t all bad. Due to some unfortunate events I moved one of my projects to Dreamhost in hopes of finding some other solutions to my problem. (I’ve been looking for a good reason to check out Dreamhost for a long time, I guess I got my wish.) I did quite a few test and found that regardless of 20+ queries that Gigpress asks for Dreamhost served it up 54 queries in 0.462 seconds, not bad. Bluehost was serving 54 queries in 2.542 seconds… Ouch!!!

So what did I do? I found a different plugin. Might I recommend Gigs Calendar. I stayed away from it for a long time because it’s admin is said to only work with Firefox and Safari. So be sure to read the Other Notes on the plugin from the WP Plugin Directory.

Take my advise, don’t over look your query load just because you’re not seeing a problem… it will come back to bite you…

Try these functions in the footer of your theme, if there not already there.
echo get_num_queries();
timer_stop(1);

I’ve been using these for ever, but I’ve never appreciated them more than I do now