When the chessboard first hit the interwebs I was hosting this site on my own ‘business grade’ broadband connection. For the small but regular level of traffic it was sufficient but the sudden increase quickly brought it down so it was moved in a hurry to a paid-for hosting service. The first thing I expected was the database would be more responsive as it’s run on a dedicated server. Haha.
I’ve found doing any work on the site beyond posting and checking comments to be tedious due to the slow loading and frequent failures and recently even just loading the main page is timing out regularly. I assume it’s this bad for the rest of you using it?. Anyway I’m now searching for a faster host, it may be a couple of weeks but I’ll post a warning before moving anything.
(Posting this took 6 attempts – I’ve edited a typo, let’s see how long it takes to repost.)
Good luck on your quest. I recommend Dreamhost for hosting. They are reliable and their customer service has been great whenever I have had issues (even helping me sort out problems that I caused :-P)
It has always been slow for as long as I have been coming here. Though I don’t have pages timing out regularly like you are.
Hosting the website pics on imgur dramatically increases the speed of all the websites I have known that have done it. Except for the few times when imgur is down and you can’t see any of the pics…