Our new jewellery store is hosted on JustHost.com. I owned the a standard shared server for couple of years now and it was doing it’s job. My static pages were served, email was working fine. Until we started doing something serious…

We tried to run Harry Fay for a week before I realized it is terribly underperforming. I got used to response times around 2s (total page load 7s), but I failed to observe that quite frequently server needed much more time to produce a result – up to 38 seconds! I’ve spend half a day before contacting tech support, which said “it won’t work, but a Pro account or VPS”. I didn’t want to manage the full box, so I choose Pro account.

What are the differences between standard and pro shared server on justhost.com? Well, the Pro hosting seems to work. Both machines were 32 cores, 32GB of ram, but the standard server was overbooked. On standard machine vmstat was showing 35-50 processes waiting at any given time, while on the pro server I see between 0 and 15. Memory usage is also healthier on Pro hosting – I’ve seen minimum of 6GB free while the standard hosting was swapping. Average response time is down to 600ms (compared to 2100ms) and I haven’t noticed any choking.

My general feeling is that the standard shared hosting on just host is not worth it’s price if you want to use it for anything more that static webpage of your kittens. The tech support is generally accessible and will deal with small issues quickly. The answer for bigger issues is: pay more.