Manuel Oviedo runs LaGuiadelasVitaminas.com a health site featuring all the latest health advice…dieting, nutrition, fitness, supplements, and other health trends. It’s only one site in his huge content network of 30+ sites (around 6 million hits/month) all loading tons of ads. We reduced him from THREE (3) poorly-performing VPS servers at $700/month…down to just ONE (1) server for $285/month AND brought his load times to instant.
Manuel first came to me with a terrifying situation. His previous hosting company had prescribed him 3 dedicated VPS servers at the cost of $700/month, promising him blazing performance and incredible support…but the servers could barely handle his massive traffic. Their response to every issue was to upgrade and buy more servers which only helped somewhat but his sites were still slow. Pages were crawling and user engagement was at an all-time low. His homepage took 10+ seconds to fully load. When he refused to pay for any more upgrades, they stopped responding to his support requests. He couldn’t understand how a company he trusted for years could not handle his traffic.
In steps JohnnyVPS. We promised him it could be done with one server for $285/month and not only would his bill be cheaper but his one server with us would actually be faster. He loved what he was hearing but it sounded too good to be true. Only one way to find out—LET’S TEST! It was there that we became great friends. Turns out we both had similar working styles and loved playing with similar details in WordPress. I not only did his speed optimization but also showed him how to do his other sites. He enjoyed learning for about 2 days before decided to sit back and let me handle everything since it was far more involved than he initially expected.
With his absolute faith in my hands, we began the “scary migration” from his 3 servers down to one JVPS server. He was scared for his businesses and had already been burned in the past, so I held his hand the entire way. Carefully moving each site over one at a time. What made Manuel’s sites so difficult to work with was the inefficient coding, massive plugins, and numerous ads on all his sites. His theme and pagebuilder were not built for performance and he had many database-heavy plugins that he insisted were “essential” to his business. On top of that, his sites were loading tons of ads on each page. We had no choice but to make it work! We optimized everything that we could and left the rest alone. Caching had to be tweaked several times to get it just right.
When everything was done, he could hardly believe it. His massive traffic (over 3k concurrent users) was finally brought down under control. His sites went from loading in 10 seconds to loading INSTANTLY. We had made a new friend and fan for life. His 3 previous servers were always at 800-1600% load; with our one server…all traffic was easily-handled at 25% server load. To be honest, I couldn’t believe it either.
