MultiCharts Support and management,
I, like many other users, like contributing on the forum for several reasons, such as helping others and an appreciation of the MultiCharts product. And MultiCharts Support people have been encouraging us to contribute to the forum, because this provides clear benefits for them (less work) and the MultiCharts product (more a sense of community).
But on a personal note, the lack of investment in a decent webserver has been highly discouraging to remain an active poster. It has already driven me to the point that my consideration is not anymore "Can I answer this question?" but instead has become "Do I want to spend up to dozens of seconds per page view while answering this question?".
As an example, the page in which I'm typing this response took 20 seconds to load. But to collaborate my point with some facts,
here's a webspeed test from yesterday (30 seconds load time) and from
today (17 seconds). Oh, and the Project Management site is not accessible for me today due to a fatal error caused by too few resources:
An interesting read for whoever is charged with the website operations of MultiCharts is
this article, which provides an introduction at speeding up websites. I'm not sure you, the webmaster, needs such an introductory article, but I assume you might need it since even basic things have not been implemented yet. You might also want to check out companies like CloudFlare and Incapsula, not only for their website acceleration tools but also for their PCI certified WAF or their features for
valid SSL certificates. You will probably also notice that the costs of these services are less than your monthly costs on coffee, so you (the webmaster) can probably easily make a case for this speed and security improvement with the financial department.
Here's an interesting
study for your sales department, which shows that almost half of online shoppers want to have pageload times less than 2 seconds. That study is a few years old (from 2009), but it seems a safe assumption that people in 2014 have become more (and not less) demanding of technology and website speed than in the past with all these highspeed internet connections.
I'm not sure why such a low emphasis has been placed on the website speed because in my view (and probably in those of the previous posters), a low website speed is not productive and annoying. I suspect that the "Thanks" given by the MultiCharts employees in this thread underlines this point: no one (employees, existing customers, and potential customers) likes to work with a slow website.
I know this post is "crying in the wilderness" in the sense that there very probably will not be a response from the webmaster (or this post even removed due to 'non-constructive criticism') but I hope that I make clear that a slow website speed is (in my personal view) not conducive to a good user experience. As a loyal user, I felt the need to speak up even though it might be in vain.
