I’ve had some problems with JustHost.com in the past, but over the last two days, I’ve been really struggling to get a database-heavy site to perform correctly.

Typically, the MySQL server is blazing fast and absolutely smokes my local workstation. But this weekend, on average, it’s taking the justhost.com MySQL server 5.42 times longer to run a query than my lousy $400, Core 2 Duo Dell laptop. Below are the results of four different ALTER TABLE table ADD INDEX (column) operations that were run in phpMyAdmin on both the justhost.com server and on my local machine, and the differences in time between the two.

Adding an index to a table in MySQL (1):

justhost: Query took 10.8276 sec
laptop: Query took 1.7399 sec

It took justhost 6.22 times longer to run this query.

Adding an index to a table in MySQL (2):

justhost: Query took 16.3461 sec
laptop: Query took 3.0225 sec

It took justhost 5.40 times longer to run this query.

Adding an index to a table in MySQL (3):

justhost: Query took 2.0694 sec
laptop: Query took 0.4179 sec

It took justhost 4.95 times longer to run this query.

Adding an index to a table in MySQL (4):

justhost: Query took 2.1861 sec
laptop: Query took 0.4266 sec

It took justhost 5.12 times longer to run this query.

This wasn’t always the case. The last time I needed to run some time-consuming processes, the justhost.com server chewed through in seconds what it took my laptop minutes to accomplish. Something is wrong.

Update: Within two hours, the problem was fixed, and the database was back to being amazingly fast.