Magento Performance/Speed

[draftzero]

Siteground advertises itself as hosting magento, which it does, but the speed is not great... is there any solution that they offer (other than vps/dedicated hosting)?

I ran across another host and their magento demo/some real websites perform better... i may just switch to them if there isn't anything i can do to increase performance/speed with siteground hosting.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[Val]

Magento is a big application (with a huge framework) and requires a lot of resources really. The latest installs I have made for our customers were working quite quickly though, but it is true that I can only test them freshly installed, which usually is not what you would like to have (i.e you would start modifying it adding modules, templates, products etc).

A simple way to speedup an application which uses a database to store most of its data is to optimize the database itself. You can do so easily by going to your cPanel -> phpMyAdmin section. Apart from that, you can try to further tweak the cache system.

I can recommend you to first test the other host however. Usually our competitors would place a demo site on a dedicated server and needless to say, there is no way you can compare Dedicated server with a shared hosting one.