Hosting Migration, Website Redesign
Website Redesign & Hosting Migration: Parma Rod & Gun Club
Mar
Parma Rod & Gun Club is a large gun club just 40 miles northwest of Boise, ID. The club is growing fast, with 100s of new members added in the past few months. The club had a website based on Joomla, but it was old and hadn’t been maintained for years. The installed Joomla version was v3.9.23 (deprecated on 8/16/2021, over 4 years ago; the current Joomla version is v6.0.1) and the installed PHP version was v7.4 (deprecated on 11/28/2022, over 3 years ago; the current PHP version is v8.2). Worse, the club no longer had admin access to the Joomla installation and it appeared that it had been hacked as website traffic had gone up by as much as a factor of 20×.
Not good.
Parma Rod & Gun Club had worked with another developer on a new WordPress-based website which was claimed to be “production ready”. That website was anything but “production ready” with many features being nothing more than image placeholders and the design/layout being a complete hodge-podge of pixel-tweaked elements. After a considerable amount of work, Cardinal Acres Web Development completed a new WordPress-based website and was ready to install.
Under the assumption that the increased site traffic was due to the prior Joomla website being hacked, the new WordPress website was installed on the club’s existing web hosting provider. Unfortunately, the new WordPress website continued to suffer numerous “resource limit exceeded” errors, dropped connections, and overall slowness (shades of the Hughes Precision project from almost a year ago). Given that Parma Rod & Gun Club was paying a premium rate for their web hosting service and obviously not receiving a premium product, the decision was made to migrate the website to KnownHost.
Just as with Hughes Precision, migrating to a quality web hosting provider makes all the difference. It wasn’t even possible to perform a PageSpeed analysis of the website while hosted by the previous hosting provider:
The site on KnownHost shows pretty decent performance and a substantial improvement from the previous hosting provider (note that this is before any performance tweaks or installation of caching plugins):
The KnownHost hosting plan is 25% of the cost of the prior hosting provider’s plan and has substantially improved performance. Win, Win.