Speed

Our shared servers are well connected in a major UK data centre - We use Gigabit ethernet connections to the data centres fast network. We used to be able to demonstrate this with a product called Speedtest which we could run on one of our actual hosting servers. Sadly this used Adobe Flash so was outdated and has been replaced by an HTML 5 product below. This will allow you to measure your speed but not to our specific servers. The faster the better but as a minimum you should have 2 Mbps down speed and 0.5 Mbps up speed.

What could slow things down

These are a few factors that could slow down your hosted database.

1. I guess the first point to make is that it is most unlikely that a hosted database will be as fast as one local to your own computer
2. You have a slow local connection - this will show as generally slow performance
3. The design of your database requires a lot of data at once - this will show as particular actions being slow
4. You use high definition images on layouts - this will generally only affect the initial loading of a layout. After that your copy of FileMaker Pro should cache the design
5. Long sorted lists - this will show when these lists are in view
6. Bad structure - you have too many fields in a table. FM will download all even if you view only one
7. Bad structure - you have everything connected to everything in a complex relationship diagram.
8. Lists with un-stored calculations displayed - this will show when these lists are in view
9. Summary fields that are always adding up or counting displayed lists of items
10. Finds using fields with un-stored calculations
11. Your design does not use styles for layout design. eg old classic style designs with each object individually specified.
12. Something on your network is doing a major upload or download (such as an offsite backup system like Backblaze)
13. You computer is running slow (eg lots of web pages open that use Adobe flash in your web browser)
14. You are suffering short breaks in connection - this will show as random slowness and in extreme cases require you to log back in. If you suspect this and know how please run a ping and route test scan on our server and another site such as Google.
15. Another user has a database making huge demands (this is very unusual but we are happy to investigate if you alert us at the time)
16. Servers can play up (we scan servers constantly to check they are online but on rare occasions they just run slow and we need to restart the server - please alert us in an email if you suspect this)
17. Your ISP has applied traffic management to port 5003 (this would not slow WebDirect as this is port 80). This is very unusual but will require you to contact your ISP. A good way to test is to connect from home or some other location with a different ISP and compare results
18. It was not strictly a speed issue but we once had a problem when a customer could not connect at all from South Africa. After investigating this was discovered to be a DNS error on a computer in the Netherlands

The using styles on WebDirect technique also speeds up Go and Pro