TOPIC: why is this site slow?

It is not my internet connection. other websites respond quickly. But this site here is slow. just wanted to share. thanks

I think it has to do with the raindrop animation in the banner, since that is there also for me it's slow, especially on mobile.

Sometimes our web hosting seems to slow down yes.

Also this platform and template isnt the fastest, if and when we get time we may develop something faster, ever since we used the template we have now, things slowed down a little.

We dont have uber expensive hosting by any means also, and were not on a cloud platform.

Gaia wrote:
Could be a factor, but in theory once the image loads once ur browser should have it locally.. it is probably worse on phones.

I think the webhosting is a bit slower than usual right now too, its lagging. just have to ride it out.

I disabled the banner but it is still very slow. I think it needs new hosting.

It is terrible right now, youre probably right about the hosting being the only answer.

Myself and Frog just dont have the time right now to move the site, and we'd also have to make sure any change was an improvement and not worse.

For long periods of time the hosting has been quite decent and for now im hoping they sort it out so its workable again.

Problems with logging in,
Font colours not working (anti white font tactic?)
Sometimes images not working
30 seconds to a minute to load a page

The irony Mac'

hi novum,
Hope you will have time soon. It is annoying to have to wait for the pages to load. You will have more visitors, more participants and generate more revenue if the site is faster. Let me know if you need help. Thanks.

Its a frustrating situation yes, no less for me than everyone else.

I will see what i can do, some improved hosting is in order as what we have now is too restrictive and while its been decent for many years, theyre slowing things down too much in the past six months or so all too often and it doesnt look like its going to get better again.

Fungi Tobewi wrote:
How is having inexpensive hosting that pulls us up on resource usage ironic fun guy?

The forum is constipated by the shite of that Frothy Fungus, that's the only explanation, novum.

Ask Cheddar Man.

It's not the rain drop banner as that's just a tiny little gif and once it's downloaded it's cached locally and it has exactly zero impact on page load speeds. The problem is latency which is the time it takes the server to respond to the browser. It's definitely the hosting, but as you say the site has slowed down considerably compared to six months earlier (and that was posted in Feb of last year) I'm guessing the traffic on your site has increased, causing the slow down. I don't know if any changes were made since the last post in this thread but it's definitely still slow.

I see that you're raising money to cover hosting for one year which is only $340 USD, which tells me you're likely on a shared server and that will be the problem. Or if you're on a VPS you may just want to upgrade your cores and RAM. I'm speaking from experience here so feel free to ask me for more insight.

Yes shared server, and that is definitely the problem.

However our modest hosting costs have allowed the site to survive for almost 7 years when many others fall by the wayside.. we dont have anything to sell here etc etc so we were conservative with hosting from the beginning.

Are donations your only source of revenue to keep the site going?

OpenMind wrote:
Yes for the most part, members have donated for the past few years, myself included.

The founder (username Diamondgeezer ) was covering costs initially, then unexpectedly passed away.

We do accept ads on the RHS for $3 usd a month... and a member here has utilized that , hence also contributing to the site in that way.

This site exists essentially because a bunch of us got banned from the David Icke Forum, and freedom of speech seemed to be difficult to find elsewhere on the interwebs back in 2012..... this was a place where we could have a bit more freedom.... i dont have a computer/tech background or any kind of technology business sense, (some will argue I have no sense at all )

I learned a little as I went along, we never had any kind of grand plan for this place, and the founder, Diamondgeezer, did say he was going to cover running costs indefinitely from the start, and was paying all the bills..... so when he passed away there was no plan beyond that at the time.... thats when we eventually put a donations button up.

You have no idea how much that story hits home with me. I've been banned from various sites for daring to believe something that others don't. I'm even considering setting up my own forum where free speech and free sharing of ideas and discussion rules, but then I found this place. The internet needs more places like this.

I'm only disappointed that the forum software seems a bit dated and the server is slow. Perhaps we can work together to address those issues.

Perhaps it was a mistake using Kunena, it was open source though and the native forum of joomla. We couldve gone with phbb at the time also as that was open source.

We knew funds would be difficult to come by sometimes and I tend to think ahead, so I wanted this place to be sustainable hence didnt spend $ on a vbulletin license or similar.

Some of the joomla templates seem a little heavy, I dont think this template is particularly fast and that is on top of the very modest hosting. So a slow template makes for a slow site.

When we set this place up, there was 3 of us setting it up, the aforementioned Diamondgeezer, myself, and a user called Frog.

Frog had experience with websites and with Joomla, so he installed it and the forum on the server. Kunena was the 'native' forum of joomla , so we went with that. Changing it now and transferring all the data to a different kind of forum would be full of issues to say the least. But when I think about it, I dont think we really need to change from Kunena, the issues are more to do with the hosting, and perhaps the Joomla template. The last template we had here seemed faster, but as things date, everything needed a newer template, seems most joomla templates have a finite life span before they need to be updated or become obsolete.

Frog isnt around anymore as he decided to step away, leaving me to keep the place going.

So then I learned how to manage it , do css also and a bit of coding etc.

The forum, Kunena, is also an older version, I know they have updated it, however it needs a newer joomla template to work , and I simply havent had the time to try update it and get it all right, as quite often with these things there are display issues that need a good amount of time to fix using a css override file.

I think the biggest issue though is the hosting, as a shared server we are slowed down and this even occurs if other sites on the same server/IP that have nothing to do with us have more use.

But perhaps it would work better if the template was changed and the upgraded Kunena installed.

We do have a reseller hosting account, as Frog thought that would give us the best bang for the buck regarding webhosting, so it is not difficult for me to set up another cpanel account where myself or others can experiment with different things on what would be essentially a seperate site to this.

So this site can be left alone until another one is built up, then transfer this domain name to the new site, or the new site to this cpanel account. Either way works.

I have done this exact thing in the past when upgrading this site, as it has been through a few iterations and templates, and I can even just set up a subdomain , for example, test.truth-zone.net, without buying extra domains.

'Cloud' hosting and so on is also on my radar, again ive find it difficult to find the time to delve into it, quite often when I post here its either early morning before work, or late when im too tired to be able to do these things, especially when im not really a website guy, it doesnt come natural to me and my skillset is limited.

You can see an example of another site hosted on the truth zone account here, I havent bought a seperate domain name to save $$.... this is a forum which was called sanctum zone and was also set up by Diamondgeezer, had its own domain name.... but it was run by others and they eventually abandoned it.

I was able to get my hands on a backup file and restored it onto the TZ reseller account. It is an older version of Kunena and the template is older, still running Joomla 2.5.

sanctum.truth-zone.net/forum.html

^That is still a fully functioning forum btw but next to nobody posts there. It was actually busier than this place at one time, with more members logging in at any given time than this place has ever seen. Anyway point is, we can set up extra sites like that to experiment.

novum wrote:
The irony was that the issue occurred whilst I was posting on this thread about the issue, and the double irony is that it's just happened again and I had to repost this post. once it calmed down into just being hyper slow and not not working at all.