Launched my new site.....OH DEAR!

digitalpaintworks.co.uk. My web hosting is with HOSTINGER and after trying out TRANSMIT I used FILE-ZILLA…DISAPPOINTIN RESULT! Video on home page takes so long - several clicks on play button. In my Gallery page I have a slide show of 12 of my paintings. Again there is a long delay before before the show [lays. But the big problem is this: I am visually impaired and my wife is totally blind and she uses a screen reader on a Windows machine. Once she got the slides to play, I assumed that her screen reader would voice the “ALT TEXT” set for each slide. Maybe this is my fault, or perhaps Blocs. I am doing a complete re-build, but does anyone know if there is a way for descriptions in auto format for slides? OR would I best create a page with the 12 images and captions underneath PLUS ENTER 'ALT-TEXT" for each image? (I tried viewing the website on my Mac, using voice-over, but my ignorance of the facility didn’t help…Let’s face it maybe such an old boy shouldn’t be messing the website at my age LOL!

Your video is not that big at only 36mb, however I also experienced significant buffering before it started to play, so this would likely point that to your web hosting being very slow. If you like I could try putting the video on my server for you to see the difference, then remove it.

For the accessibility I must admit I am not an expert on this and used to think a browser could read the alt text with the speech settings. It looks like you are protecting the images, so when I tried it was neither possible to drag them to the desktop, nor have options when right clicking. I wonder if that is blocking this.

This is where aria comes in. I’m not on my Mac to check what Blocs adds here. But there are some specific aria attributes that can be added for a carousel.

Hi Flashman, I must admit that it is my first attempt with HOSTINGER and do not like their lack of support, except for acres of “help Documents”…I will have lost the will to live after diving into all of that. I am fairly certain you are correct about the server being at fault, but I won’t put you to the trouble of uploading the video just yet. I am going through the whole site to make sure all is clean and will re-upload ASAP. If that fails I will be migrating away from Hostinger and will come back to look through member’s suggestions for hosting Providers. A last quick note, yes I do have image protection turned on, to give me a chance to sell a few paintings - free downloads don’t work in my business model LOL!

I have no experience of Hostinger, however I have just looked at their site and the prices appear to be super low. Many of the better known web hosts do this and it invariably appears like a great deal.

Unfortunately countless others think the same thing, so the servers end up being hugely oversubscribed, leading to slow page loads. This will frustrate visitors and not win you any points with Google either.

Thank you Malachiman, my lovely lady uses a windows desktop with NVDA speech software. I think ARIA is an app for mobiles and is more for navigation purposes. Her NVDA does speak the alt text for other images on my site

My Friend, HELP! Please recommend a proper host and I will attempt to migrate away from Hostinger
Thank you Sir
Tony (Yoshi2)

I personally like guru.co.uk for myself and my clients, which I think would cost you £10 a month for a basic shared plan with email. If you use gmail or something else instead you could cut that to £5 a month and just let Guru handle the hosting.The good thing about Guru is that they are fast and stable. It just works and I cannot remember a time when it was slow in almost 4 years.

A more amateur friendly alternative would be kualo.co.uk. They do not have the same performance as Guru on their shared plans, however I found them extremely good for support. They are fast to answer and will patiently assist with any questions you have. It has been 4 years since I last had some sites there, so they may have changed, but I know they still have one or two fans here on the forum.

Those are just two I know of in the UK that I have personally used without major costs that should be better than Hostinger. If you are in the UK I definitely think you should stick with a web host here.

Some here seem to like namecheap.com. I have used them for domain registration, but not for web hosting. They look fairly cheap and may well be good, however my philosophy on web hosting is simple. Save a couple quid in hosting, but pay for it later in stress and lost time. For any kind of business cheap hosting is a false economy.

I have been using Hostinger for a couple of years and haven’t really had any major problems with performance in that time frame.

However, I will say that when starting out the first two months with their basic plan, I had to deal with a shared server that was heavily congested and constantly going down.

After almost a week of support emails, they finally migrated my sites to another server. Since then, I upgraded to their business plan, got Cloudflare, and added a few compression optimizations in .htaccess and have been happy since.

Their chat is usually a 10-minute wait, and they’re pretty fast at figuring out those small problems.

Dude, your images are HUGE. Optimise them. Also, never self host a video. That’s what YouTube and Vimeo etc are for. For webhosting, I HIGHLY recommend 20i. Been with them 2 years and never looked back. I have the reseller account which I use to sell hosting/domains. Their support is unreal and they have built in CDN and optimisation.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.digitalpaintworks.co.uk/dZzM3cQs/

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To Flashman, Thank you very much Sir, I trust your judgement after a long time visiting the forum, viewing hours of Eldar’s "tuts’ and feeling at home with BLOCS. WILL GURU handle FTP OK. I have File Zilla, Transmit and Cyberduck to choose from. Do they sell domains, I think I will get a new one while I’m at it, especially as Hostinger look as though they will take their time cancelling my account and sending a refund LOL!
Thanks agin

There’s definitely an issue somewhere.

Thanks Joe1985, I will give my images a further look, but I do have a sight problem and want all abilities to be able to use my website, and that includes letting totally blind people use my website, which is why I asked the original question about screenreader tech. Video? 20/30 second MP4 I would hope any web host could handle that

I understand that however it’s bad practice regardless of size of videos. Let’s say a few hundred people are viewing your website, it increases bandwidth by quite a lot and will not equate to a good experience for the viewer. I would personally upload to YouTube or Vimeo etc in all honesty.

Here is a good article that explains further

Wow! That is no good to anyone…Thank you TMRJIJ

@yoshi2 Yes Guru will handle FTP fine and they do sell domains, though I would only use them for .co.uk or .uk. They are expensive for .com. Lately I have been using namecheap.com more for domain registration following recommendations on this forum and they have been good.

Personally I haven’t had any issues hosting videos on the server, rather than using Youtube or Vimeo. A 30mb video on the kind of traffic you will expect is hardly excessive, as long as you don’t have it set to autoplay. Nevertheless, I think you should listen to the other points being made about the size of your images etc.

I have optimised all your images including logo and favicon in WebP so you will see significant savings. You could do with changing the resolutions on some of them however I didn’t want to do that.
Optimised WebP.zip (3.4 MB)

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WebP won’t show on Safari using older Mac OS versions unless he uses some .htaccess with Jpegs as a fall back in the same folder. In a year or two it won’t matter, because the numbers will be so small but right now it’s a little tricky if you only use WebP.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On

  # Check if browser supports WebP images
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} image/webp

  # Check if WebP replacement image exists
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$1.webp -f

  # Serve WebP image instead
  RewriteRule (.+)\.(jpe?g|png|gif)$ $1.webp [T=image/webp,E=REQUEST_image]
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  # Vary: Accept for all the requests to jpeg, png and gif
  Header append Vary Accept env=REQUEST_image
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_mime.c>
  AddType image/webp .webp
</IfModule>
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Ah fair enough. Here are optimised JPGs instead
Optimised JPG.zip (3.7 MB)

Lots of good points in this thread about hosting video and large images.

It does make me think about my previous life as a Flash developer where websites with opening page loads larger than 100Kb were frowned upon and we would never host video on any platform that didn’t support streaming.

How times have changed!