Julian Drake 
Fast requires a focus that’s not high on the list of most hosts
The search for website speed often resembles a tale of unrequited love. You were drawn to your web host with tales of global scale. Their marketing material romanced you with the big brands they hosted. Their proposal went into great depth about the technical supremacy of the servers. After endless promises of RAM and CPU induced serving speed, you accepted and came onboard.
Yet you’re just not feeling it. Your website is slow. No, “not the server must be broken slow”, just slow. You feel it, your customers suffer it and your web host is ambivalent. Surely it is their responsibility to make it fast? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘not necessarily’.
What makes websites fast is just as dependent upon the tune of the website as it is on the server. So, does that make it your web developer’s responsibility? Once again, the answer is ‘not necessarily’. Read our companion post on Why your web designer won’t keep your website fast for why they too drop the speed-ball.
What Traditional Web Hosts Do
Web hosters are concerned with web hosting matters. The concerns of web hosts are huge and they include:
- Data-centre management and maintenance
- DNS lookups and routing.
- General network speed.
- Server Hardware
- Managing Server load.
- Server software installation & maintenance
- Firewalls
- Anti-virus
- Email.
- Backups and Recovery
- Customer support tickets
That is quite a few things to keep functioning, and many different specialties to resource and operate competently. Furthermore, what you will notice is missing from that list is your ‘website speed’. So you ask, why don’t web hosts add my website speed to their long list of worries?
What Traditional Web Hosts Don’t Do
The first thing you need to understand is that traditional web hosts serve thousands, if not tens of thousands of different websites. Each website built by a different web developer. In addition, they feature different amount and types of content and built in a different CMS or CMS version. Furthermore, the code may be standard or heavily modified. Consequently, It is a vast undertaking to interpret and manage the performance metrics for such a large number of diverse websites whilst performing their existing responsibilities.
Traditional website hosts simply can’t devote the focus to the speed issues of your specific website. They are already focused on too many other complex tasks.
If you would like to understand more read our blog article How Hilenium Hosting Focuses on Fast.