I notice quite a few people including RW stack / plug-in developers use Amazon US web servers. From the UK, I notice that they are always very slow to load - anyone else notice this?
Absolutely. Also from Germany - AWS loading is often very very slow. I love Weaviums G-Sheet stack. But his demo projects are on aws and sometimes very slow to load.
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I can’t comment on the speed, but I’ve been using Digital Ocean for a few years now. Their prices are inexpensive, uptime has been 100% for years, and the give me full control over a VPS (virtual private server – which lets me run Nginx or Apache or Node or whatever suits me (currently Php running on Nginx for the YourHead server).
I get to choose where the server is located. I always choose New York. Most of my customers seems to be in California, the UK, and Germany – with sprinklings everywhere else – choosing London or New York seems the most centrally located. I choose New York – not really for any tech reason, but just to avoid any complications of running a business in multiple countries.
I’m curious what sorts of speeds folks see for the main YourHead page. If you have hard measured data (include your own bandwidth of course) I’d be curious.
BTW: if you are looking for a great VPS style web host, please consider Digital Ocean – if you use this link I get a month of free hosting. Thx: https://m.do.co/c/de869f7e936b
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Just been to about 10 of your pages including the YouTube links - very fast from here (UK).
Not secure tho??
the content that needs securing (the web-store, credit card transactions, the plugins themselves, and publishing content) all use the latest best SSL signing/encryption/etc.
but why is the site not HTTPS? it’s a long story. i don’t really want to send the thread off the rails.
but… the short version is: this is my tiny protest to Google’s unilateral decision to force SSL onto basic websites where it has little practical value to anyone other than Google’s shareholders and a huge cost to the open web.
that said, i will likely join the rank and file this year.
if you’re interested more about this, i’d be happy to chat more. 
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If you want to get a better idea of how a site performs from different parts of the world, might check out
https://www.webpagetest.org/
Under Advanced testing, you can select the test location:
You can also select the browser, and under advanced settings, you change all kinds of stuff like connection speed:
And you pick the location from a map:
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It’s fine - looked at quite a few and they all responded fast enough typically 2 seconds so not like a rocket but not an issue either. Being rural, I don’t have the fastest broadband either - average 15MB download which is of course fast enough but sometimes stutters a bit when several devices in use.
@manofdogz Thanks for checking.
All my sites run off AWS instances in the US ( Oregon and Virginia ). Never had a single complaint about speeds.
Obviously it isn’t always obvious who’s hosting a URL. But whenever I get a URL like this weavium one for example, I’ll have (from the UK) a wait of maybe 7-15 seconds for the page to load: https://s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com/weavium-bucket/products/Kalendar/preview_page/index.html
Whilst this is just an example from Weavium, I have noticed many times on various sites. Never have I seen such pages load in reasonable times - thy are always slow.
That link stalls for quite a while for me too. Not seven seconds – but a half a second of stall and a second to load the page – that’s forever and a day for me.
I’m not sure what’s involved in a direct-to the S3 bucket like this – but I’m guessing that’s where issue lives.
It could be that there are some extra redirects and lookups happening behind the scenes to serve up this file.
In any event, I think it’s a good lesson for everyone to do a bit of double-checking on your sites to make sure things are loading fast. Even if only one of your site’s dependencies lives on a slow URL it could impact the perceived speed of the whole page.
Isaiah
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For what it is worth. The speed at which a page loads for a given product from a given developer is a key factor in my purchasing decisions. If the technology it uses seems to have too much overhead, I simply don’t buy it. No matter how shiny it is. Speed matters in SEO ranking and more importantly customer retention.
In this case the problem seems to be with the host, not the content. The content looks to be quite fast (judging from the Network timeline in Chrome dev tools), but the host just takes a very long time to reply to the request.
But I think you’re still right to pass on slow sites.
If the developer is not paying attention to the speed of their own servers, then there is a good chance they’re not paying attention to the speed of their products either.
Then again, the internet has off-days. Hosts have maintenance sometimes. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt – if the product is good perhaps check back another day just to be sure the site really is slow.
Isaiah
The weaviumsite isn’t generally slow - it’s just the ‘live preview’ pages that use the https://s3.ap-northeast-2.amazonaws.com URLs
Isaiah you are correct. The internet has off days. I always look several times to figure out if that is the case or overhead and/or bad code.
“the Internet has off days”
i like that. i think i might steal that little turn of phrase.
Some of them are huge, I think the fluid one was ~20-30 MB
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